Mexican Abortion Activists Mobilize to Aid Texans

The New Yorker Radio Hour

WNYC Studios and The New Yorker

Politics, Arts, News, Wnyc, Books, David, Storytelling, Society & Culture, Yorker, New, Remnick

4.2 • 6.2K Ratings

🗓️ 23 November 2021

⏱️ 14 minutes

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Summary

Mexico is a deeply Catholic nation where abortion was, for a long time, criminalized in many states; just a few years ago Coahuilla, near the U.S. border, imposed jail time on women who had the procedure. This year, Stephania Taladrid reported, Mexico’s ten-member Supreme Court voted unanimously to deciminalize abortion throughout the country—to the shock even of activists. But before they had finished celebrating they turned their attention north, to Texas, which has practically banned most abortions with the S.B. 8 law, which is currently being reviewed by the Supreme Court. Texans may find themselves crossing the border to obtain legal abortions. Taladrid spoke to activists who are sending medications that induce abortion—which are available over the counter in Mexico—across the border into Texas. But they may face risk in doing so. As the legal scholar Jeannie Suk Gersen explains, a new Texas law criminalizes delivering those medications to pregnant women.

Transcript

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0:00.0	This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick.
0:04.6	And I'm Gia Tolentino.
0:06.3	We're going to continue now our two-part program on the future of abortion rights,
0:11.3	as the Supreme Court weighs critical cases with repercussions for the entire country.
0:17.0	So while abortion rights in the U.S. are being challenged at every turn, in Mexico, their Supreme Court finally decriminalized abortion just this year.
0:26.1	Before that, abortion was illegal in much of the country.
0:30.0	Stefania Teladryd covered that story in Mexico for the New Yorker, and now she's thinking about what this might mean for the state of Texas.
0:37.8	Here's Stefania.
0:40.5	Abortion is a deeply polarizing issue in Mexico.
0:45.3	You need to remember that this is the world's second largest Roman Catholic country.
0:51.4	And even though the Supreme Court had issued a series of remarkably
0:55.9	liberal rulings in recent years, the unanimous character of this ruling was just a big
1:03.0	surprise to even the feminist groups who had been fighting for this for decades. You know, there was
1:09.8	even an earthquake that evening. It was a
1:14.7	magnitude 7 earthquake, and a lot of people took it to be a symbol of what the ruling
1:22.7	implied for the country.
1:24.3	The constitutional criminalize the aborto.
1:28.7	Today is a historic for the rights of all the
1:31.7	women,
1:32.1	Mexican and the persons gestant.
1:37.4	The case that was under consideration by the court
1:40.4	in Mexico originated in the state of Kuala.
	...

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