Mexico's Supreme Court is expected to rule early next year on a petition to have Mexico City's law overturned on constitutional grounds. Abortion opponents are skeptical about their chances.
"It will be difficult, because attitudes are changing," said Jorge Serrano Limon, leader of the National Pro-Life Committee, the leading antiabortion group here. "The pro-abortion current is growing tremendously. At the beginning, there was resistance in the medical community. Now there isn't any."
Serrano Limon fears that two Mexican states with leftist governments, Guerrero and Tabasco, might legalize abortion soon. Venezuela and Brazil could be next in the region to change abortion laws.
"This has been the bitterest battle because now we are seeing killing at a large scale," said Serrano Limon, who formed the National Pro-Life Committee when Mexico's Communist Party first proposed legalizing abortion in the 1970s.
Serrano Limon lashed out at Mexico City Mayor Marcelo Ebrard for signing the bill into law less than a day after it was approved by the city legislature, dominated by the mayor's Democratic Revolution Party. Ebrard's public health department has worked to make abortion available to any woman who wants one and whose pregnancy has not progressed beyond 12 weeks.
"The Aztecs sacrificed prisoners of war, but not even they killed as many people as Marcelo Ebrard is killing now," Serrano Limon said.
The votes of eight of the 11 jurists on the Supreme Court would be needed to overturn the law on the grounds that it violates the rights of the unborn. But Serrano Limon and others count at least four jurists already in the abortion rights camp.
Legalization supporters say that with each day that passes, it is less likely that the court will overturn the law and drive abortion back underground.
Many of the old secret "clinics" that offered the cheapest and most dangerous surgical abortions, usually for about $400, have closed. Private hospitals that once charged as much as $2,000 for an illegal abortion have been forced to sharply reduce their prices, Lamas says.
"The aura of sin, fear and economic extortion is gone," Lamas said.
Still, many of the women who have received the first legal, "on-demand" abortions in Mexican history are entering unknown emotional territory. Some say they approach the decision with dread.
