Mexico and Abortion

 

NGO Ipas Promotes Illegal Abortion Network in Mexico

Editor’s note. This is reprinted from the monthly newsletter of the Parliamentary Network for Critical Issues. “NGO” refers to Non-Governmental Organizations. Ipas is an international abortion advocacy organization.
While promoting access to abortion as a “reproductive right” at the United Nations and advocating for the elimination of pro-life laws, Ipas is also busy creating illegal abortion networks in Mexico. The work is based on an “accompaniment model” which pairs abortion seeking women with volunteers who guide a woman through the self-induced or do-it-yourself (DIY) abortion and is the subject of the documentary “Accompaniment” by Ipas partner Las Libres.
According to the Ipas website, “Ipas partner Las Libres has produced a short documentary film detailing its successful ‘accompaniment model’ that pairs women seeking medical abortion [chemically-induced abortions] with women committed to accompanying others on a volunteer basis throughout the process of a safe abortion.” (It is important to note that “safe” abortion in this context is illegal abortion or in Ipas terminology “outside the formal health system”.) Las Libres Executive Director Verónica Cruz stated, “…we were tired of hearing that abortion is almost always a negative experience for women.”

The network promoting the illegal destruction of children in the womb has been operating for a number of years in the Mexican state of Guanajuato where abortion is legally restricted and permitted only in the case of rape but where Ipas has trained volunteers on the use of abortion inducing pills for illegal DIY abortion. Volunteers accompany abortion-minded women to the pharmacy to buy the drug–usually Cytotec/Misoprostol–and tell her how to take the pills, calling or texting during the abortion process.

Las Libres’s goal for the network is to change the cultural view of abortion by showing “the other face of abortion, the positive experience, the accompanied experience, the exercise of the human right of women to decide, and the accompaniment of women by other women who have lived the accompaniment process … to see how after a safe abortion, accompanied, that woman, that couple or that family eliminates the stigma around abortion.”

The film is expected to be shared “widely via social media, public screenings, university classes, conferences, partner organizations, and through the various accompaniment networks that already exist across Mexico” with the intent that the “film will help reduce the stigma surrounding abortion in Mexico and help viewers cultivate a new and more positive perspective on abortion.” The NGOs hope that abortion activists in other countries will create their own illegal abortion networks.
PNCI notes that according to the Pew Global Views on Morality Survey, 63% of people in Mexico believe having an abortion is morally unacceptable.

Source: NRLC News