In Mexico, legal struggle to free women jailed for abortion continues
About 200 women are still in prison in Mexico under outdated anti-abortion state laws even though the Supreme Court decriminalized abortion last year, advocates said.
MEXICO CITY — About 200 women are still in prison in Mexico under outdated anti-abortion state laws even though the Supreme Court decriminalized abortion last year, advocates said.
Some of these women suffered miscarriages and never had an abortion procedure, advocates said. Yet they are still being punished under many state laws that consider abortion to be a form of homicide.
The laws even applied to women who haven’t had an abortion, but who suffered miscarriages.
The slow legal process to free women who are still imprisoned made some progress this month when Aurelia García Cruceño, a 23-year-old Indigenous woman who was just released from prison after three years for having a miscarriage. But many more women remain in jail for seeking abortions, which is no longer a criminal offense.
García Cruceño grew up in a Nahua indigenous community in one of the poorest mountain regions of Guerrero state. In 2019, a local village official raped her and she became pregnant. She went to live with relatives in the Guerrero city of Iguala, where she was taken to a hospital for bleeding.
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