Investigators from Human Rights Watch cited the case of a 25-year-old Mexico City woman told by health workers to order a coffin and call a hearse to take away her aborted fetus.
Human Rights Watch investigators also interviewed a 16-year-old girl in the central state of Guanajuato who was repeatedly raped by her father. She begged authorities to allow her to have an abortion but was denied.
"I want to declare that I don't want to have the child that I am expecting," she said, according to court documents quoted in the report. "Because it is my father's, I will not be able to love it."
Aurora del Rio, a top official with the federal Health Department, said she agreed with most of the studies' findings. "We have made progress in the past five years, but there is still much work to be done," she said.
Women seeking abortions must first file a legal complaint against the rapist, then obtain a court order authorizing doctors to perform the procedure. In Mexico City, regulations require the rape victim to be photographed before and after the abortion, a requirement that women's groups call a deliberate attempt to humiliate.
In recent years, Mexico City officials and women's rights groups joined in an extensive publicity campaign to inform women of their rights to an abortion in the event of rape. Nevertheless, only 25 women sought legally sanctioned abortions in Mexico City last year.
Lamas, the Mexico City feminist, considered even that figure a step forward. The year before the campaign was launched, only five rape victims in the city of 9 million people sought legal abortions, she said.
Estimates of the annual number of illegal abortions here range from 600,000 to 1 million.
"We feminists have been fighting for legal abortion in Mexico for 35 years," Lamas said Tuesday. Full reproductive choice in Mexico is a long way off, she said. "This is a task that will take us another 35 years."
Federal health officials say at least 1,000 women die of medical complications from illegal abortions every year.
Mexico's center-right government is split over the issue. Last year, two Cabinet ministers in the government of President Vicente Fox clashed publicly over whether hospitals here would be allowed to distribute the "morning-after" pill.
Health Secretary Julio Frenk determined that use of the pill did not constitute abortion. But in response to protests from antiabortion groups, Interior Secretary Carlos Abascal, a devout Catholic, said the principle of "the defense of life" would not allow the pill's distribution. The health secretary eventually prevailed.
Presidential candidate Felipe Calderon of the ruling National Action Party has said that, if elected, he would withdraw the morning-after pill from hospitals. In response, large groups of young protesters have shown up at his campaign appearances with signs declaring, "Yes to the Pill!"
