Not surprisingly, Cardinal José Francisco Robles Ortega, the archbishop of Guadalajara, this week criticized the recent decision of Mexico’s Supreme Court to declare unconstitutional the criminalization of abortion in the federal penal code.
Mexico is becoming “accustomed to a culture of death,” Robles said, and “a society adrift in its ability to protect human life.”
The Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Mexico, in its weekly magazine “Desde la fe,” said the court’s ruling should not be seen as a victory for feminism. “Is this really the long-awaited answer that women needed from feminism?” an editorial stated. “Shouldn’t they be promoting a feminism that really strives for the integral development of women?”
In an interview this week, Supreme Court judge Ana Margarita Ríos-Farjat explained that despite the court’s groundbreaking ruling two years ago that outlawed abortion in the state of Coahuila, the federation and many states declined to enact reforms and kept the criminalization of abortion in their penal codes (Jalisco is one of these.)
Ríos-Farjat said thousands of clandestine abortions still take place each year in Mexico, a “reality the state has to take care of.” Legal abortion is an “issue of solidarity and understanding for vulnerable communities,” she said.