By EDUARDO PAZ-MARTINEZ
McALLEN, Texas | Starting this morning, American women can jet into Cancun and get an abortion. It's legal in Mexico, and it's cheap in its most popular, easily accessible resort.
Welcome to deciding what you can and cannot do with your own body.
This from a report at motherjones.com: [ Three nights at a three-star hotel there can cost as little as $129. A three-day car rental in the resort town rings in at just $20 per day. And the price for one surgical abortion at MSI Reproductive Choices’ Cancún clinic would be about $350.
Starting today, when the international sexual health organization MSI Reproductive Health Services opens the doors to its first Cancún reproductive health center, a pregnant American from a US state where abortion is banned could find the procedure to be both more affordable and more accessible in Mexico.
Quintana Roo, the Mexican state where Cancún is located, has become one of at least a dozen Mexican states to decriminalize abortion in the last two years amid a series of judicial rulings that have strengthened reproductive rights, culminating in a September Mexican Supreme Court ruling that made state laws criminalizing abortion unconstitutional nationwide.
After some brief delays in obtaining all the necessary licensing permits, MSI’s new Cancún clinic will serve as one more option for some Americans seeking reproductive healthcare. "Whoever needs our help," says Araceli Lopez Nava Vázquez of MSI, "we would be happy to serve." ]
So much for head-wrecking decisions.
Yes, who knows? Perhaps an expense of some $600 (with airline travel from McAllen) is a bit too much for a poor woman, but maybe not for a young couple not quite ready for a nuclear family, or for the victim of a rape, or maybe just someone abandoned by a boyfriend or lover.
Mexico used to be known as an abortion haven for Americans who found more than plenty clinics along its border with the United States. That was ended when the Catholic Church's strong influence on Mexico curtailed the practice.
When the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade (the law dating back to 1973) last year in Dobbs vs. Jackson Women's Health Organization, Mexico began looking at abortion once again, as in availing clinics. The Mexican Supreme Court ruled on September 7th of this year that penalizing abortion was unconstitutional. Before 2019, abortion had been severely restricted outside of Mexico City, where it was legalized on request in 2007, according to Wikipedia.
It'll be interesting to see if Mexico quickly becomes a hot abortion destination, and whether the Mexican border towns will again see the arrival of the sort of abortion clinics they had up until the mid-1980s.
Yeah, what will rabid, anti-abortion Republicans do?
Pressure Mexico into outlawing its abortion stance?
Threaten to cut foreign aid?
Build the Border Wall even higher?
It could get weird, yes...
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[EDITOR'S NOTE:...Flights from McAllen International Airport to Cancun will cost you about $400 roundtrip aboard Aeromexico, Air Canada, American Airlines or United...]
Interesting. Mexico's on it. Looks like it to me.
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