Pro-Lifers in Mexico are condemning violence after abortion activists in Quintana Roo occupied the state legislature and are demanding the legalization of elective abortion. The Catholic News Agency reports that in November, the abortion activists staged a protest outside the legislature in the city of Chetumal. They then stormed the building and set up camp, refusing to leave until legislators approve legal elective abortion in the state. Since then, groups of radical anti-Life feminists have occupied the legislature, harassing elected officials and demanding the legal killing of preborn babies.
The abortion activists appeared to lessen their stranglehold in February but increased violent demonstrations after Pro-Life legislators successfully stalled the passage of the abortion bill. In late February, the radical anti-Lifers replaced the Mexican flag at the legislature with a green banner with the words “abortion on demand.” The Mexican army took down the anti-Life vandalism on February 26.
Pro-Life advocates in Mexico condemned the actions of anti-Lifers. Brenda del Río, the founder and director of the National Campaign for Life–Long Live Mexico, told the Catholic News Agency, “We Mexican women who work in the pro-woman cause have dissociated ourselves from the terrorist acts that a handful of women, including Argentine and Venezuelan women, have carried out since late November by seizing the Quintana Roo state congress.”
Del Rio said that the anti-Life groups “have camped inside the premises, preventing the legislature from doing its work.” According to del Rio, some of the anti-Life demonstrators have dogs with them “to look even more defiant,” and “are threatening legislators if they don’t pass the right to abortion.”
Unfortunately, del Rio says, the anti-Life legislators who introduced a bill to legalize abortion on demand up to 12 weeks in Quintana Roo have capitulated to the protesters and even assured them that they will not be prosecuted for occupying the legislature. Del Rio said that this sends the message that “if you want to advance a social cause, legal or illegal, you have to vandalize, threaten, take over public buildings and force lawmakers to fulfill an international agenda that is alien to the principles of Mexico. This amounts to the promotion of violence.”
As Texas Right to Life has reported on many times, this type of violence goes hand-in-hand with the promotion of abortion. Abortion is a horrifically violent action that involves the destruction of an innocent preborn baby. If the stated goal of an activist group is the legalization of this violent killing, we should not be surprised when they resort to violent means of advancing their cause. In other parts of Mexico, anti-Life demonstrators have set fires, vandalized cars, and injured dozens.
Contrary to the demands of anti-Life radicals, del Rio said that the crisis in Mexico is not a lack of abortion but a lack of support for mothers and babies. She explained, “What do we urgently need to legalize in Mexico? Maternity. Workers who are pregnant are fired from their jobs. Pregnant women are abandoned by the man. Poor women are pressured in clinics to be temporarily or permanently sterilized. Pregnant students do not have childcare in high schools or at the university.” Abortion does not solve these issues, but instead ends a child’s life and leaves the mother and family in the same circumstances they were in before the crisis pregnancy.
Del Rio and other Pro-Life leaders in Mexico are standing against the international pressure to legalize elective abortion. She said, “We Mexican women cannot allow our laws to be changed from abroad, trying to kill the nation (yet to been born) by tiny groups of Mexican women, dressed up with their faces covered like a thief, threatening our legislators. Long live Mexico is what we want.”
As in the case of Ireland and Poland, well-funded international abortion groups are putting pressure on Pro-Life Mexico to abandon protections for the preborn.