Feminism, Human Rights, and Abortion Debates in Mexico

Abstract:Although the history of reproductive politics in Mexico is long, this article focuses on one short period of that history—a year that featured an explosive national debate over opposing human rights claims made by feminists and pro-life activists as they argued over a law passed in 1990 by the Chiapas state legislature to decriminalize abortion. Claims by feminists that legal abortion was necessary to realize women's human rights collided with pro-life claims for human rights protections from conception. While the positioning of the right to abortion at the center of women's human rights claims has been effective at garnering support for legal abortion, it also reveals a dilemma of human rights campaigns, the tendency to focus on legal rights as universally relevant to all women and the failure to attend to the particular, and often economic, needs and demands of women in diverse historical and geographic contexts.