Documenting Mexico’s Culture War

The Postindustrial Conundrum

Discourses and social actors emerge from specific historical moments and structural contexts. Deep-seated structural and technological changes over the past few decades have marked the end of what Beck (2000: 13–14, my translation) calls the era of “simple modernization,” an era in which tradition was rationalized and the industrial paradigm was consolidated, giving rise to a “life model in which sexual roles, the family unit, and social classes formed part of a coherent totality.” “Reflexive modernization,” consumed by the “dilemmas of the self” (Giddens, 1991: 189), characterizes the imprecise, nebulous, and chaotic interlude that follows this rationalist period of the centrality of science and Fordist industrial development. Beck’s description of this era as a moment of “industrial production without industrial society” indicates the profound dislocation of production, politics, and culture that previously had fashioned the life experiences of industrial times. Present-day institutional dysfunction underscores contradictions between the increasingly incongruous institutions of simple modernity and rapidly changing existential realities. As past norms and values melt away, a sense of lost normality permeates daily life. Reflective and reinvented identities and new relational possibilities brought about by structural and technological transformations have created the need for constant renegotiation of traditional institutions and cultural meaning. The nuclear family is a case in point. New representations and forms of organization have reconfigured the family. Beck (2000: 16 and quoted in Castells, 1999: 17) speaks of the “post-family family,” and Touraine (1997) sees the family as the best example of deinstitutionalization. He uses Roussel’s term the “uncertain family” (46) to describe a unit that today is defined more in terms of communication among its members than by any predetermined framework or kinship system (33–35).

Tensions between stagnant institutions and rapidly changing relationships and realities have shaped a new field of contention. Contrasting discourses dispute the cultural significance of pivotal points in our understanding of the family, the state, and the place of religion in governance. They ponder issues such as the moment of personhood, the relationship between reproductive rights and women’s equality, the philosophy of human rights, and the mission of the state. This is not a geographically contained dispute but permeates global realities in multiple national and local arenas. Often, contested discourses dealing with women’s rights and roles in society create contrasting representations of femininity, with representations of women as sovereign and independent confronting representations of women as the essentially cohesive components of family and community (Goldman, 2009: 169). In what is increasingly a global culture war, traditional, conservative, and patriarchal discourses challenge the secular, inclusive proposals of cosmopolitanism. ¹ Mexico’s abortion clash is one expression of this emblematic controversy over cultural meaning in our current uncertain times.

Recent Events

In the face of Mexico City’s legalization of abortion during the first trimester of pregnancy in 2007, conservative politicians across party lines, in alliance with civic-religious organizations and church hierarchies, implemented a national strategy to preempt state-by-state legalization. In 17 of the 32 Mexican states, legislatures crafted laws that limited women’s reproductive rights by recognizing the personhood of embryos and their right to life from conception. (One additional state, Chihuahua, had passed a similar law in the 1990s.) Though abortion has never been legal in Mexico except in cases of rape or threat to the mother’s life, these laws have particular symbolic weight because they represent a new, conservative push to reposition women’s bodies within the boundaries of patriarchal religious rule. The four-decade-long debate over abortion in Mexico has been marked by tensions among three principal actors: feminists and their allies, the Catholic Church and its supporters, and government officials representing political parties with contrasting ideologies.

Women’s diminished mobilizing capacity in recent years is responsible in part for the fact that feminist activism was able to deter the passage of antiabortion laws only in Veracruz (in 2009) and Baja California Sur (in 2011). Feminists did, however, influence the decision of Baja California’s ombudsman and militant citizens in other states to challenge the laws before the Supreme Court, contending that they violated the fundamental rights of women guaranteed by national jurisprudence and international accords. Since their passage, doctors and nurses in public hospitals have been obligated to inform police of suspected abortions. Many women have been jailed for ending unwanted pregnancies. A rough, unofficial estimate indicates that more than 300 young low-income women have been incarcerated in nine states for offenses related to these laws (Rodríguez, 2010).

Feminist Cosmopolitanism

Though feminism has never been a mass movement in Mexico, the social capital of a highly educated critical mass accrued greater symbolic and political influence than its numbers suggested. The current debate on abortion has highlighted the degree to which feminist discourse has been adopted over the years by a wide range of intellectuals and opinion makers unwaveringly defending a free-choice, public health perspective.

By the 1970s, industrialization had reconfigured Mexican social structure and culture. Rural-urban migration swelled the cities, a growing middle class was thriving, birth control was available for those who could afford it, and an incipient feminist movement claimed “choice” as part of women’s reproductive sovereignty. The idea that the personal is political inspired the conviction that full female citizenship was contingent upon achieving reproductive autonomy, for which abortion came to represent an emblematic last resort for women’s empowerment. Unofficial estimates calculated 4,000 illegal abortions a year, with a 10 percent fatality rate. ² Given abortion’s implications for health, independence, self-determination, and quality of life, its legalization was considered central to women’s citizenship, but because of fierce Catholic opposition feminists saw legalization as politically unviable at the time.

The 1980s witnessed a new strain of women’s activism born of a grassroots movement spreading across the peripheral urban ghettos that housed a growing poor migrant class. Low-income women’s organizing was focused on basic material needs, including government welfare benefits, affordable housing, health care, and child care services. Abortion was played down because of the Catholic conflict associated with it. The later reorganization of social, political, and cultural structures unleashed by the global shift to neoliberal politics, followed by the expansion of regional and global connections unfolded by the cyber revolution, paved the way for an upsurge in transnational and global women’s networks. Organized in the form of nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), this new feminist activism focused on influencing public policy through international platforms such as the United Nations. With the consolidation of neoliberalism in Mexico, urban grassroots movements lost their political clout as the state’s sense of social responsibility declined. Professionalized feminist NGOs negotiated greater slices of gender equality within legal frameworks by lobbying for equal rights in national and regional legislatures. The Mexican feminist agenda of the 1990s stressed women’s leadership, reproductive and sexual rights, equal political representation, and the elimination of violence against women.

The collaborative intervention of local and national feminist NGOs in the 2000 rape and pregnancy case of a 13-year-old Oaxacan immigrant, Paulina Martínez, in Baja California not only materialized the new translocal-transnational order of women’s political organizing but also reignited the abortion debate in Mexico. After local Partido Acción Nacional (National Action Party—PAN) functionaries and health care professionals procrastinated in performing Paulina’s legal abortion (within the first-trimester window) in spite of the Baja California Justice Department’s instructions to grant the request, the consortium of local and national feminist NGOs representing Paulina—in connection with a broader international feminist community—brought the case before the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR), suing the Mexican state for violating Paulina’s right to interrupt her unwanted pregnancy. The case’s settlement involved Mexico’s promising to guarantee women’s reproductive rights in similar cases, including making the morning-after pill available for rape victims in public hospitals. ³

Patriarchal Religious Conservatism

The Catholic Church has been the main actor in the abortion debate, given that, from its perspective, abortion violates three basic tenets of Catholic philosophy: human life as divine intention, procreation as the basic function and sacred obligation of marriage, and motherhood as women’s primary mission. Christian dogma establishes that women’s vocation and mission as mothers, their role as wives in binding heterosexual unions, and an embodied sacrificial altruism, sensibility, intuition, and intense loyalty to family and community are not only ideal female virtues but also inherent gender traits. Since feminist ideology calls into question the validity of the natural family, Catholic conservatives consider feminism a threat to the Church. Muzzled by secular legal restrictions progressively imposed on the Church in Mexico to control its economic and political power from the nineteenth century on, ⁴ initially the religious authorities were able to mobilize only a network of Church-linked antiabortion associations and flash crowds of Catholic faithful. In time, religious political strategy expanded to involve grassroots marches and prayer sessions to sway public opinion in favor of antiabortion laws. New civic associations defended right-to-life reforms, heterosexuality, and the traditional family, while collaboration among Catholics, Evangelicals, and other minority actors shaped religiously oriented public policy. These actions reveal a growing recognition of religious diversity in a historically Catholic country, on the one hand, and a newly crafted space for religious entities to engage in politics, on the other.

These new political-religious tendencies can be traced to the 1992 constitutional reforms passed under the Partido Revolucionario Institucional (Institutional Revolutionary Party—PRI) administration of Carlos Salinas, which conceded a greater public voice to religious denominations, thus challenging over a hundred years of secular restrictions on religious agency and paving the way for Mexico’s current religious activism. These reforms not only prompted more frequent and insistent Vatican interventions in matters of public policy, but also fashioned a new framework for all religious denominations to come out of the silence of Mexico’s secular revolutionary past. Increasing religious political activism led by the Catholic Church against reproductive and sexual rights has repositioned the original feminist-traditionalist divide within a much broader conflict that ultimately challenges the separation of church and state, one of the mainstays of the Mexican nation-state.

An authoritarian, corporative, and political machista culture has limited feminist influence in most political parties and organizations (Lamas, 1992: 11). The cultural iconography of the Mexican Revolution institutionalized a machista gender culture as a vital part of a new-found national identity (Guttman, 2000: 320). Masculinity was represented as a risk-taking, gutsy, womanizing and reproductively potent, commanding experience, while femininity was characterized by abnegation, virginity, propriety, and—above all—motherhood. Fertility reconciled and legitimized the two gender identities. Having “all the children God sent” spoke to the hegemonic rural economy of the times, the lack of modern birth control methods, and the absence of family planning policies. Thus the abortion debate questions not only fundamentalist Catholic mandates but also secular revolutionary gender representations.

Cosmopolitanism, Secular Culture, and Abortion

Four decades of evolving women’s activism have made feminists central actors in shaping Mexico City’s public policy on gender equality and reproductive and sexual rights. In addition, the compounded and overlapping effects of globalized neoliberal structural conditions and the 14 years of secular governance under the social-democratic Partido de la Revolución Democrática (Democratic Revolutionary Party—PRD)—infused by a cosmopolitanist compulsion to recognize and legitimize cultural Others (Beck, 2007: 56)—have transformed Mexico City’s gender culture. The city has been reconfigured as a global city and the epicenter of the pro-choice movement in the collective imaginary of Mexican politics. In 2000 the Robles Law, proposed by the feminist academic and PRD mayor Rosario Robles and supported by a host of like-minded civic leaders and nonprofit organizations, expanded the legal justification for abortion in the city to include fetus malformation and serious risk to maternal health. In response, Church authorities threatened to excommunicate those who supported the law, and 22 congressional representatives, mainly from the Catholic-based PAN, challenged it before the Supreme Court. The Supreme Court, however, favored the law with a seven to four majority vote.

In 2007, a proposal to legalize abortion in Mexico City sparked a lengthy and highly visible public debate. A network of NGOs in support of the measure based their arguments on three main premises: (1) Gender equality is contingent on a woman’s right to exercise full control over her body and fecundity. (2) Abortion is a public health issue, given its implications for women’s mortality and morbidity. (3) Legal abortion is a matter of social justice, since class stratification results in unequal access to safe abortions when it is illegal. Católicas por el Derecho a Decidir (Catholics for the Right to Decide—CDD), an organization of Catholic believers that stands for freedom of conscience, was especially valuable in dispelling the doubts of Catholic legislators who feared excommunication for supporting the bill. The CDD argued that, according to Catholic jurisprudence, excommunication could be based only on actions, not on opinions. CDD’s position illustrates the diversity within Catholic circles on issues of reproduction and sexuality (Maier, 2008: 39).

There is a growing discrepancy between Catholic doctrine and parishioners’ sexual and reproductive practices in Mexico, indicating an increasing tendency toward selective filtering of church doctrine in the creation of diversified contemporary lifestyles. A 1992 national survey on abortion found that 78 percent of participants considered whether to terminate a pregnancy through abortion a concern limited to women and their partners (Lamas, 1992: 3). In 2003 a survey conducted by CDD found that 91 percent of Catholics surveyed in Mexico City thought that adults should have access to a wide variety of birth control methods; 82 percent agreed that adolescents should also have access to them, 93 percent wanted sexual education taught in public schools, 96 percent supported the Mexican government’s condom program to prevent AIDS, and 81 percent opposed excommunicating women who had abortions (CDD, 2005).

On April 24, 2007, Mexico City’s Assembly legalized abortion during the first trimester of pregnancy with an overwhelming 46 in favor and 19 against. As a last resort, two PAN presidential appointees, the president of the National Commission on Human Rights and Mexico’s attorney general, filed lawsuits on the basis of unconstitutionality with the Supreme Court. These lawsuits were seen by abortion advocates as representative of the religious ideology of the governing PAN. Increasingly blurred boundaries between secular governance and religious beliefs have characterized the two PAN administrations since 2000.

Opposition from the Catholic authorities and allied civic associations, ⁵ religious-driven judicial strategies contesting the new law before the Supreme Court, and preemptive right-to-life laws in other federal entities underscore a contemporary religious tendency to dispute the separation of church and state. Considered a basic tenet of modernity and a precondition for social and political diversity and religious freedom, the separation of religion and governance is being called into question by conservative discourses. Religious conservatives propose to resolve the uncertainties of our anxious times by reinstating the order and morality of a past era. The secular position, by contrast, relies on individual freedoms and rights as a way of achieving plural, open, critical, and democratic societies. Secularism asserts that freedom requires reciprocal autonomy between church and state in modern societies, dividing law and morality into allied but separate camps (Ferrajoli, 2002: 12). Moreover, as a methodology, secularism allows multiple ideologies to coexist in functional harmony (Bobbio, 1981: 857), producing a way of life based on individual rights and freedoms linked to religious tolerance and freedom of conscience (Blancarte, 2000: 118–123).

The Supreme Court decision in 2008 in favor of legalizing abortion in Mexico City set a judicial precedent that implicitly relegitimized the separation of church and state while underscoring the need to balance women’s rights with those of the fetus, and indicating that categorical protection of the fetus might violate women’s right to life, liberty, dignity, nondiscrimination, health, reproductive freedom, sexual freedom, religious freedom, personal development, and autonomy. In his opinion, delivered on August 2, 2008, Justice Góngora-Pimentel asserted that state intervention to bring a pregnancy to term would interfere with women’s autonomy and citizenship. In contrast, Mexico City’s archbishop characterized the law and the Supreme Court’s rule as criminal, asserting the primacy of religious mandates over society’s laws. By disavowing the legislation, the archbishop was seen as implicitly questioning the legitimacy of congressional and judicial authority and, ultimately, the validity of the secular state. Such statements served to orient followers in the battleground states where right-to-life laws would soon embody a conservative crusade for cultural meaning.

Local Agency Disputing Cultural Meaning

In October 2008 Sonora became the first state—after Chihuahua in 1994—to recognize the personhood of embryos and guarantee their rights. As in most of the states that followed, there was no public discussion on the matter, and the law was passed in a relatively covert fashion. Here and in all of the other 16 states, rape and threat of maternal mortality were the only considerations for a legal abortion. (Baja California, for its part, eradicated all possibility of legal abortion by guaranteeing the precedence of the new law over all earlier jurisprudence.) With reduced numbers, waning passion, and diversified interests, feminist activism against the right-to-life laws was initially symbolic and reactive, limited in scope and impact. Only in Veracruz and Baja California Sur was it able to prevent a conservative vote. Various factors contributed to this loss of political force, cohesion, and focus, among them the structural and social reorganization produced by neoliberal policies, which left working-class women with little time for nonessential activities, the reduction of funding for women’s projects as a result of Mexico’s reclassification as a developed country by international organizations, the institutionalization of feminist demands in national, state, and municipal bureaucratic apparatuses, and the professionalization of feminist NGOs as consultants.

In 2009, however, feminists reactivated their legal and network resources to challenge the right-to-life laws, coordinate actions, and strategize. Influenced by Baja California’s ombudsman’s lawsuit, feminists in Sonora, Jalisco, and Colima sued to prevent right-to-life state laws from going into effect. Pressed by local feminists, congresspersons from San Luis Potosí challenged their state’s antiabortion law before the Supreme Court. Four hundred members of the Pacto Nacional por la Vida, la Libertad y los Derechos de las Mujeres (National Pact for Life, Liberty, and the Rights of Women) placed caged women in front of the national Congress, protesting the many incarcerations of women who had undergone abortions (Norandi, 2010). In some cases, poor women from rural communities have received 25-year sentences for miscarrying (García, 2010). Jalisco’s law, which doubles the sentence for women who are not married, have a bad reputation, or have concealed their pregnancy (Aranda, 2010a), is considered especially egregious. The head of the National Women’s Institute voiced particular concern about a bill that proposed substituting women’s incarceration with “rehabilitation,” while the director of the regional office of the United Nations Women’s Fund raised the possibility that such laws could be jeopardizing Mexico’s international commitment to guaranteeing women’s human rights (Saldierna, Román, and Gómez, 2009).

Final Considerations

In September 2011, Mexico’s Supreme Court deliberated claims about the unconstitutionality of the right-to-life laws in Baja California and San Luis Potosí. Though 7 of the 11 justices considered the laws unconstitutional, a supermajority of 8 is needed to repeal a state law. In this case, a 4-justice minority was decisive in upholding the right-to-life laws in these states, thus restricting possibilities to birth control for women by blocking access to the day-after pill, criminalizing abortion in most cases, ⁶ and even subjecting women who have miscarried to police scrutiny. In deference to prior Supreme Court decisions, the majority opinion contends that absolute defense of the fetus’s right to life denies women the right to autonomy, dignity, and control over their bodies and their lives, thus viewing the laws as a violation of women’s human rights.

Of the four deciding justices, two based their arguments on a naturalist interpretation of human rights, akin to the Catholic defense of the right to life as an absolute value that takes precedence over other rights. The two remaining justices defended states’ right to rule on fundamental rights without breaching the integrity of the federal constitution. These justices had recently been named to the court by Mexico’s president (in 2011), and their appointment was seen by some as an attempt to reconfigure its liberal tendency on issues of reproductive rights. Certainly their position exemplified a swing toward traditional discourse on issues of states’ rights versus federal rights, the meaning of life and personhood, women’s rights, and the roles and rules of the family.

Ultimately, however, this dispute between cosmopolitan and conservative discourses points to a much broader global conflict, one whose outcome will define the direction and values of the post-“post”-era to come. Though women’s bodies, sexuality, and reproduction appear to be at the heart of the dispute, what is really at stake is the characterization of the family, the relationship between church and state, the role of government in regulating intimacy and private lives, and the validity of freedom of choice as a guiding principle for human and social development.