Mexico’s supreme court has decriminalized abortion across the country, two years after ruling that abortion was not a crime in one northern state.
That earlier ruling had set off a grinding process of decriminalizing abortion state by state. Last week, the central state of Aguascalientes became the 12th state to decriminalize the procedure. Judges in states that still criminalize abortion will have to take account of the top court’s ruling.
The supreme court wrote on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter, that it had decided that “the legal system that criminalized abortion in the Federal Penal Code is unconstitutional, [because] it violates the human rights of women and people with the ability to gestate.”
That’s absolutely not true, it was just viewed as a sexual sin before. The catholic church has been against abortion since the 1500s, arguably you could even say it goes back to the early 600s when they tried to find ways to distance themselves from pagans. It wasn’t until the late 1960s when public opinion changed about it being a sin against taking life, then I believe in the 70s the Pope made a public statement, which made it canonical.
As a random side note, St. Thomas of Aquinas take on fetal status was kind of interesting. He viewed a fetus as having 3 states or “souls”; a vegetative soul, an animal soul, and finally a rational soul once the body was completely developed.
" In 1591 the new Pope Gregory XIV reversed the decision, declaring abortion to only be homicide if it took place after ensoulment, which he determined took place 166 days into a pregnancy, or well over halfway through the second trimester. This decision lasted for 278 years until Pope Pius IX reversed the decision yet again in 1869 and made abortion after conception a sin that automatically excommunicated those involved in its procurement from the Catholic Church."
166 days would be over 5 months.
From at least 1500s on it was never “fine” it has always been a sexual sin, that can lead to excommunication from the church. How that works in practice is extremely regional. Even prior to the 1500s it was still an excommunicable offense in most areas, there just isn’t documented policy that I know of.
I also love how whatever quote that is from is using the word “trimester” in relation to something from 1591 when the US Supreme Court coined the term centuries later.
They use trimester to make it meaningful to modern readers, not to imply the rule used that language originally. Like if you were to say “a cubit, or about a foot and a half.”