Mexico’s supreme court has decriminalized abortion across the country, two years after ruling that abortion was not a crime in one northern state.
That earlier ruling had set off a grinding process of decriminalizing abortion state by state. Last week, the central state of Aguascalientes became the 12th state to decriminalize the procedure. Judges in states that still criminalize abortion will have to take account of the top court’s ruling.
The supreme court wrote on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter, that it had decided that “the legal system that criminalized abortion in the Federal Penal Code is unconstitutional, [because] it violates the human rights of women and people with the ability to gestate.”
Can you describe that? I feel like everyone says that about Canada, Europe, etc. But when I try to nail down what they are afraid of, they are like, “if I need a knee surgery I want it NOW! That could take months in Canada!”
Is it like that, or are there like actual life threatening problems being unaddressed?
Some of the most recent examples: recently there has been a critical shortage of psychiatric medicines. Lots of people didn’t have access to their antidepressants, antipsychotics, and lots of other medicines you can’t skip without disastrous effects. While I don’t use public health care, I still had trouble finding some of my prescriptions. The equipment and buildings are in disrepair, because of lack of funding and corruption. This year there was a scandal because a girl died crushed by a elevator in a clinic. Then they found lots of corruption with the company that installed the elevators. Some weird things have happened, for example, a woman went for abdominal pain and when she woke up, the doctors had amputated both of her legs. Also, it’s common that women deliver their babies outside the hospital because it is over capacity. Etc, etc…
i can confirm the medicine shortage, not just in psychatric recently, but in other pharma fields, along the years.
our Latin American brothers and sisters in Spain were doing their best to send medicines to their families in LATAM. you could also see people asking on Twitter for medicines. iirc it was commented on the news too.
here in Spain we also have public healthcare, and we all people pay for those medicines so individuals don’t have to assume all the cost on their own. pandemic has shown our healthcare system is not as good, public and clean as our corrupt politicians tend to say, but still, we think public healthcare is the way to go.
in Spain abortion is legal since many years, but a year ago or so, in a region of Spain, a extreme right-wing party wanted to create a regional law to make women asking for abortion feel guilty.
medicians would be obligated to ask women “before aborting, would you want to listen to your baby’s heartbeat, or that we take a 4D radiography of them?”.
the women could refuse, but the medicians would be obligated to ask. this extreme right-wing party tried to push this regional law proposal in an attempt to push antiabortion agenda bypassing the national abortion law.
this right-wing party wanted to make women feel guilty of their abort decision, as if many many women hadn’t had enough guilt, doubt and sadness when asking for abortion bc they aren’t in the position of having a baby (see our emancipation, salary and unemployment rates), or they weren’t even in a position of conceiving in first place (rape, mental suffering, codependency, drug abuse, etc.). this political party wanted to take advantage on these women’s situation of vulnerability. that’s horrible.
(also in that region, big part of medicians and population overall were known of being right-wing and sexist. that’s how this right-wing party got power to propose this law).
fortunately, it seems we have progressed, to the point many medicians were the most angry at this, and them, along with feminists (many are both), and citizens in general didn’t allow this law to happen in this region of Spain.
but sorry for digressing, the main point is that many people in Spain are very happy for Mexico. we wish you the best. we hope our LATAM siblings get the progress and independence they wish and deserve. we are on it too here. let’s do this 💪
Jesus
Your complaints are valid, but I’m going to counterpoint US healthcare for those that reads this and is “Ah hah!”
The US is getting hit by the same med shortage, I’m not as strongly linked but I know a couple friends being bounced from one anti-depressant to another because one after another went short.
But our for profit system is literally shuttering hospitals across the country. What you’ll get is private investment firms that buy up hospitals, bleed them for capital until the hospital is unable to run and it closes. Kansas right now is one of the worst states for hospitals in rural places where they’re closing up left and right. One of my hospitals I traveled to that I was shocked didn’t close was because a doctor committed suicide and had evidence on his phone that he molested patients while they were under sedation. This brought JACO and every other hospital regulatory commission on this hospital where it was found the hospital was bought up by one private capital firm after another, their debt dumped on the hospital and sold off. Literally the commissions coming in is all that saved the hospital because the current firm is now being forced to modernize the hospital and get it back to standards.
And in the case of the abortions being criminalized, states that have it criminalized are now having OBGYN doctors leaving the state than have to be put into a struggle against their ethics and the draconian law, leaving birthing centers closed up in hospitals and leaving it to the ERs that are already over capacity from being the only safety net left to those that can’t afford insurance and all the hospital closures pushing more to those individual places.
And yet still, it’s at least there. And it’s being improved time over time. Mexico today is leaps and bounds ahead of Mexico 20 years ago. I know, I’ve lived here for 20 years. People here at least care
In Canada, yes stuff like joint surgeries can take a little longer to queue… But I have never actually known anyone to die on a waitlist and the turn around for things like cancer is pretty short.
The trade off is stuff like there was a friend’s Dad that needed an emergency medical transfer from a smaller rural hospital. They did it by helicopter ambulance and he spent just shy of three months in hospital in intensive care. He didn’t have any additional medical insurance but his family never needed pay for anything. Furthermore the hospital contracted with a hotel near by so his family could stay in a nice place walking distance to the hospital for around 20 bucks a night.
We as a country have a very small population, about the population of the state of California spread over more land mass than the entirety of the US and then some. There are challenges with that and the fact our dollar is weaker so it’s overall less lucrative, but the turn around regarding knee surgeries make a lot of sense once you realize that. Changing our system to a pay-per-play would not necessarily alleviate the wait times.