In Mexico, Powerful Forces Drive a Furious Debate Over Abortion

The proposed law in Mexico City, which is a federal district and functions much like a state, is potentially broader than the law in Yucatan. The measure would permit abortions in the first trimester of pregnancy if having a child would be "incompatible" with a woman's "life project," a standard that could allow abortions for pregnant women who don't want to interrupt school or work. It is backed by the Democratic Revolutionary Party, or PRD, which holds a large majority in the city legislature.

The national legislation, also sponsored by the PRD, faces a more difficult challenge because the ruling National Action Party, or PAN, staunchly opposes abortion. President Felipe Calderón said in an interview last month that he considers the current law "adequate" and would oppose changes.

In this nation, the church has mounted an aggressive campaign against the abortion proposals. Led by the church hierarchy, thousands of demonstrators waved banners earlier this month decrying "a culture of death" while marching to Mexico City's Basilica de Guadalupe, one of the Catholic world's holiest shrines. The Vatican also dispatched its top antiabortion campaigner, Cardinal Alfonso López Trujillo, to Mexico City. Mexico's highest-ranking Catholic, Cardinal Norberto Rivera, has repeatedly criticized the abortion proposals during sermons and described abortion as "an abominable crime."

Mexico outlawed abortion in 1931. But it created an exception, allowing abortions for rape victims. The law did not set a cutoff date for the procedure, meaning those women can have abortions at any time, even eight months into a pregnancy. Sen. Pablo Gómez, sponsor of the national abortion proposal, likes to point out that Mexico for decades had a less restrictive abortion law than the state of North Carolina, which didn't legalize abortion until the 1960s.

There are few abortion prosecutions in Mexico, where a university study estimated there are 1 million abortions a year. The rich either go to the United States for abortions or to private clinics in Mexico, where their doctors are the sole judges of whether the procedure fits the parameters of the law. The poor, who can seldom get abortions at public hospitals, go to what critics refer to as back-alley "charlatans," who openly advertise their services.

"Abortion has been privatized in Mexico," Gómez said in an interview. "It's a bad joke."

Abortion rights activists say as many as 3,000 deaths in Mexico each year are due to botched abortions, making it the fifth-leading cause of death among women. As many as 10,000 women a year are hospitalized because of complications from abortions, activists say.

Both sides are flooding radio and television with advertising. The Mexico City legislature, whose PRD majority says the Catholic Church is violating Mexican law by getting involved in the political debate, is placing 30,000 triptychs around the city to explain the proposed law. In an interview, Serrano Limón said his organization, Pro-Life, is spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on advertising, including posters of Mayor Ebrard with aborted fetuses.

Antiabortion activists have enlisted one of Mexico's most famous comedians, Roberto Gómez Bolaños, better known as Chespirito of the television show "El Chapulin Colorado" -- or "The Red Grasshopper." He appears in frequent television ads, saying his mother refused doctors' advice to undergo an abortion. Abortion rights advocates countered with advertisements starring Paulina Ramírez Jacinta, a rape victim whose case became an international symbol in 2000. Despite a law allowing abortions for rape victims in the city of Mexicali, local officials refused to permit one and she was forced to have the baby.

"How nice that Chespirito's mother was allowed to decide," Ramírez Jacinta, now 21, says into the camera. "My family and I also would have liked to be able to decide."