Mexican state of Yucatán is country’s latest to decriminalize abortion

The Mexican state of Yucatán became the nation’s 23rd state to decriminalize abortion last week. With the vote, abortion is now no longer penalized if within the first 12 weeks of pregnancy.

The Yucatán Congress voted 22-13 on April 9 for “the right of women and pregnant persons to decide up to 12 weeks” to abort their preborn children, though “the state constitution continues to protect life from the moment of fertilization,” according to the Catholic News Agency.

Violators committing abortion after 12 weeks will face three months to one year in prison, or between 50 and 200 days of community service. The Women’s Secretariat of the Government of Mexico called the decision a “historic breakthrough in the fight for reproductive rights.”

Catholic News Agency notes that the lawmakers also voted to increase penalties for forced abortion, from the current sentence of three to eight years in prison to a sentence of five to 10 years. In cases of forced abortion with violence, penalties will go from six to nine years in prison to nine to 15 years in prison.

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For decades, abortion in Mexico was illegal outside of Mexico City. That began to change in 2021 when the Mexican Supreme Court ruled a Coahuila state law unconstitutional which penalized a woman with three years of prison time for an abortion. After the court’s ruling, abortion was no longer considered a federal crime, though most states still had laws restricting abortion. In 2023, the Mexican Supreme Court declared that three articles that criminalized abortion in the penal code of the state of Chihuahua were also unconstitutional.

With these rulings, individual states have taken action to decriminalize abortion within their jurisdictions.

News of the most recent decriminalization led Yucatán’s Catholic Archbishop Gustavo Rodríguez Vega to make a statement, expressing dismay with the lawmakers’ ruling.

“God created us to care for our lives and the lives of all others, and within all others is the human being who lives in the mother’s womb from the first moment,” he said, according to CNA.

He added that we are all called to be “servants of life, of the barely conceived, but of human life as long as the human being lives until his or her final moment of natural death.”