When its six-week abortion ban went into impact on Might 1, 2024, Florida joined almost two dozen different U.S. states that ban abortion or vastly limit it.
These legal guidelines got here into impact after the Supreme Court docket’s 2022 determination to overturn Roe v. Wade ended almost 50 years of the constitutional proper to abortion in america.
Florida well being officers in 2023 reported greater than 84,000 abortions statewide, together with almost 7,800 from out-of-state residents.
The Tampa Bay Occasions lately reported that about 2 in 5 abortions in Florida over the previous six years occurred within the first six weeks of being pregnant, that means that roughly 60% of the procedures carried out over that timeframe could be unlawful beneath the brand new restrictions.
The brand new legal guidelines in Florida and different states are sending some People throughout the border into Mexico to entry an abortion, the place the process was legalized in recent times.
Clinics in Mexico don’t require proof of residency, so strong numbers about who they’re treating are arduous to return by. However suppliers in Mexico report they’ve been seeing extra People.
In 2022, Luisa García, director of Profem, an abortion clinic within the border metropolis of Tijuana, advised NPR that the proportion of sufferers coming from america had jumped from 25% to 50% in simply the 2 months following the Dobbs determination.
My analysis and instructing focuses on gender and sexuality in Latin America and the Caribbean. I typically ask college students to consider the variations between america and Latin America — and the struggles the 2 areas share.
Totally different paths
Lately, the U.S. and Mexico have every struggled over entry to abortion care, with the 2 nations shifting in reverse instructions.
The yr earlier than the U.S. Supreme Court docket reversed Roe, the Mexican Supreme Court docket dominated the criminalization of abortion by the northern state of Coahuila unconstitutional. This determination set a precedent that led to decriminalization on the federal degree in 2023.
Change has since been gradual. Solely 13 of Mexico’s 31 states have modified their penal codes to mirror the courtroom’s decision, with Jalisco being the most recent state to take action, in April 2024.
In contrast to within the U.S., federal legal guidelines in Mexico don’t mechanically overrule native ones. However Mexican ladies residing in states the place abortions are unlawful can nonetheless have one in a federally run hospital or clinic. And the federal statute protects the employees of these services from punishment.
Marea Verde motion
A vital pressure behind the legalization of abortion care in Latin America is a motion known as Inexperienced Tide, or Marea Verde, which emerged in Argentina and expanded throughout the area over the previous twenty years.
Though it started as a collective struggle for abortion rights, Inexperienced Tide has grown to embody points such because the prevention of violence in opposition to ladies and members of the LGBTQ+ group, in addition to femicide – the violent dying of girls motivated by gender.
Enlargement of abortion entry in Mexico
Following the U.S. Supreme Court docket’s determination in 2022, Mexican organizations providing abortions have expanded places to extend selections for Mexican and U.S. residents searching for care. For instance, Fundación MSI opened its latest clinic in Cancún late final yr.
It selected this location deliberately, MSI’s Latin America regional managing director advised the well being information web site Stat. Cancún’s standing as a preferred vacationer vacation spot implies that a number of U.S. airports provide direct flights for about US$400 spherical journey. In-person abortion providers vary from $250 to $350. MSI’s web site caters to People by providing info in English and that includes hyperlinks to seek for flights.
AP Picture/Maria Alferez
To help these touring to Mexico, Mexican and American abortion rights teams created the Crimson Transfronteriza, a transnational community that helps these crossing the border in the hunt for care however whose main mission has grow to be the delivery of misoprostol and mifepristone, the drugs typically used to induce abortions, into america.
One group that’s a part of the community on the Mexican facet of the border is Guanajuato-based Las Libres, or The Free Ones. In September 2023, its founder estimated that her group had despatched abortion drugs to roughly 20,000 ladies within the U.S. for the reason that Dobbs determination.
Crimson Necesito Abortar, or I Have to Abort Community, was based in 2017 by Sandra Cardona and Vanessa Jimenez within the northern metropolis of Monterrey, Nuevo León, to assist these searching for abortion providers.
Historical past of abortion, US-Mexico border
Though the Dobbs determination introduced renewed consideration to the problem, the connection between america and Mexico and folks from each nations searching for abortions has an extended historical past.
Ladies’s research professor Lina-María Murillo, who research the U.S.-Mexico borderlands and teaches a course on world copy, explains that abortion in america was authorized and carried out by midwives earlier than the Civil Conflict. Within the following a long time, declining delivery charges and gender inequality led to restrictions throughout the nation and a nationwide ban in 1910.
As Murillo’s analysis has documented, criminalization led ladies searching for abortions to journey to Mexico greater than a century in the past.
These border crossings finally declined as Mexican abortion restrictions have been enforced and clinics shut down by the late Nineteen Sixties. On the identical time, U.S. activists and medical doctors contributed to the narrative that portrayed Mexico as a harmful place the place “again alley” abortions have been carried out by “butcher” physicians. Murillo argues that these myths contributed to a loosening of abortion restrictions in a number of U.S. states like California and New Mexico, serving to set the stage for Roe v. Wade.
As elections loom nearer in america, abortion will seemingly take middle stage as soon as once more – together with in Florida, the place a referendum to reverse the six-week ban can be on the November poll.
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