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In the state of Guanajuato six women are currently serving long prison sentences for homicide — because they had abortions. Guanajuato, with Mexico’s highest rate of teen pregnancy, refuses to teach sex education in the schools.
The women, all poverty stricken and uneducated, are three to eight years into their sentences, according to an interview Veronica Cruz, director of a women's rights center, gave to El Universal. Another 160 women in Guanajuato are facing charges equivalent to murdering a family member. Cruz says that two of the imprisoned women were raped, one had a spontaneous abortion, the rest chose to abort due to accidental pregnancies. The four who chose to abort due to unplanned pregnancies were not only abandoned by their partners, but accused by them as well.
Abortion laws in Mexico are decided on the state level, and Guanajuato is notoriously conservative — according to El Universal, it was "the only state in the country that refused to promulgate a law against gender violence, as had been federally mandated."
In 2000, Guanajuato officials tried to get rid of the rape exemption for abortion, and in 2008, "the state's congress passed its 'right-to-life' reform in a debate-free vote that lasted five minutes."
A woman who's been impregnated by a rapist and cannot afford a private abortion must petition the state for a publicly funded one—and it has denied every request since 2001. One woman was told by an attorney that although she was within her rights to obtain an abortion, no one would perform it; often hospitals send rape victims away. Many medical centers that supposedly provide legal first trimester abortions to rape victims run the victims through bureaucratic red tape until it is too late to legally abort.
Last year, Guanuajuato officials insisted "no woman in Guanajuato has been jailed for having an abortion." Perhaps someone should question authorities how many women they have imprisoned for fetal homicide.
