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Health , World

Mexico’s Grassroots Pro-Choice Insurgency

by Gina Jiménez December 12, 2024

Co-published with Foreign Policy


MEXICO CITY—The details of Esmeralda’s miscarriage sent shock waves throughout Mexican society this October.

The 14-year-old Indigenous girl said she was sexually abused by a family member and hadn’t even known that she was pregnant. But instead of receiving support for what she says was a miscarriage, Esmeralda was hit with intentional homicide charges. She was facing a three-year prison sentence and the prospect of having to pay a roughly $25,000 fine to the baby’s father—her alleged abuser.

The case outraged feminists and abortion rights activists and spurred them into action. They provided legal support, conducted a media campaign, and organized protests. The local prosecutor’s office folded under the pressure, it and dropped the charges in late October.

Abortion rights are having a moment in Mexico. The country’s Supreme Court ruled in 2021 that penalizing abortion is unconstitutional, and it reaffirmed the decision in 2023. But the government has been slow to comply, and the procedure remains illegal in many localities, such as Querétaro, Esmeralda’s home state. Her case drives home a difficult reality for activists here in Mexico: Despite recent successes, they will have to maintain a powerful grassroots vigilance against a state and medical system that they can never fully trust.

“We used to have the fantasy that once abortion was legal, we were not going to be necessary,” said Verónica Cruz Sánchez, a pioneering abortion rights activist in Mexico. That fantasy has faded.

A major force in maintaining this grassroots presence is comprised of Mexico’s abortion collectives—groups mostly made up of volunteers who help provide access to abortion services. Cruz Sánchez is the director of Las Libres, or “The Free Ones,” one of the country’s first abortion collectives. The movement has proliferated rapidly since Las Libres was founded in 2000—today, researchers estimate there are 300 to 400 such groups in the country.

Abortion collectives are known for providing self-administered abortion pills—mailing mifepristone and misoprostol to women across the country—as well as guidance on how to use them. 

But many volunteers who spoke with The Fuller Project and Foreign Policy say a lot of the support they provide is emotional. The women they work with are often going through one of the most vulnerable moments of their lives—and the treatment that they receive through official channels can be insensitive, even cruel.

Paulina Córdova, who describes herself as an abortion acompañante, or abortion doula, draws from her own experiences when helping the women who choose to come to her instead of going to the hospital.

In 2018, Córdova had a miscarriage at 24 weeks. She arrived at the hospital 6 centimeters dilated, but when her contractions stopped, the doctors didn’t give her any information about what was happening. Afterward, they sat her next to other women who had just given birth. 

“I was struggling with the loss and the pain, and the woman in front of me was holding her newborn surrounded by flowers and balloons,” Córdova recalled. 

Abortion collectives exist in many parts of the world, but they have a particularly strong presence in Latin America. Here, they’ve grown with the continent’s feminist “Green Wave” movement and the medical community’s acceptance of self-administered abortion.

When she first started this work, Cruz Sánchez would match women seeking abortions with doctors who were willing to provide them. One day, one of the gynecologists whom she worked with came back from a conference abroad and said: “Vero, I learned to do abortions with medicine.” 

Cruz Sánchez started reading up on the World Health Organization’s protocols and realized that she didn’t need doctors anymore. She and her peers would train women on using the pills, and they would go on to teach others.

But the stigma around abortion pills took a long time to go away. For decades, the medical community had emphasized the importance of supervised abortions and warned against clandestine procedures. In Mexico City, first-trimester abortion has been legal since 2007, but guidance stipulated that the procedure had to be done in a clinical setting. 

The stigma contributed to the collectives operating in relative secrecy at first—and so did the fact that abortion had been illegal in almost all of Latin America until the 2010s. Organizers wouldn’t publicize the information on how to use abortion pills and would instead talk up the dangers of clandestine abortions. 

Cruz Sánchez remembers that feminists would scold her for talking too openly about abortion. But she wouldn’t listen, and she kept training more women. While some organizations recommended that acompañantes never provide their real names or numbers while working, she did not heed their caution. “She said, ‘let’s stop this nonsense. Why won’t you share your name? If we don’t think this is a crime, why are we acting like it is?,” said Ninde MolRe, the president of Abortistas, another abortion collective, while discussing Cruz Sánchez 

Gradually, that attitude of secrecy began to change. Other organizations, such as Fondo María in Mexico City, realized that the stigma was hurting women and started talking about abortion as something that could be hard, but also liberating and transformative.

Their work received a further boost from the Green Wave movement. The massive protests organized by Argentinian women in 2018 to demand legal abortion inspired women across Latin America, and Mexico was no exception. The green bandanas worn by Argentinian protesters spread around Mexico like wildfire. Every time that Esmeralda’s lawyer appeared on television, she wore a green bandana on her left hand or neck.

The emboldened movement has made enormous progress in recent years, especially at the federal level. The ground reality is messier—roughly half of Mexico’s 32 states have legalized abortion, meaning that abortion collectives have to navigate a patchwork of conflicting rules, similar to the situation in the United States. 

In the process, the collectives have found themselves negotiating an uneasy relationship with the state—part parallel service provider, part watchdog.

For instance, informal abortion providers have long been an open secret in the state of Chiapas, where the local government has been happy to look the other way because they were helping curb the state’s maternal mortality rate, according to Suzanne Veldhuis, a medical doctor and researcher who focuses on abortion collectives.

Sandra Cardona, who heads a collective called Necesito Abortar, or “I need an abortion,” lives in Nuevo León, a state where abortion is only legal in cases of rape, incest, and situations where the mother’s life is at risk. There, pro-choice doctors refer women to her when they need access to abortion services. But Necesito Abortar also provides services to women in states such as Oaxaca, where abortion has been legal since 2019. 

“Women prefer having their abortions with us since they [doctors] treat them so badly,” Cardona said.

The widespread mistreatment of women seeking abortions has led some collectives to take on more of a monitoring role. In Hidalgo, where first-trimester abortion was legalized in 2021, the Diramona collective created an abortion hotline through which organizers refer people to local public hospitals and keep an eye on the outcomes— according to data shared by the collective with Foreign Policy and The Fuller Project, 86 percent of the abortions performed in Hidalgo public hospitals this year were referred by them.

Mexican activists are drawing inspiration not just from collectives flourishing across the country and throughout Latin America, but also from historical examples. A few years ago, MolRe saw a documentary about the Jane Collective, an underground abortion service that operated in Chicago in the 1970s. Several of its members were eventually arrested, but the charges were dropped after the Supreme Court passed its Roe v. Wade decision in 1973. 

While Roeoverturned in June 2022—was widely seen for many years as a landmark victory for abortion access, MolRe felt oddly sorry about the fate of the collective. She was sad about the structure that it had, which was lost once abortion became legal and the movement lost its momentum.

For MolRe, the lesson to be drawn from the Jane Collective’s story is clear—Mexican collectives will keep demanding abortion access from the state, but that won’t stop them from providing it themselves.