Dominated by liberals, Mexico City’s legislature is expected to legalize abortion in a few weeks (New York Times). This has created no small controversy in this heavily Roman Catholic region.
The New York Times calls the passage of the bill “groundbreaking” given that only three countries in Latin America—Puerto Rico, Cuba and Guyana—allow abortions for any reason in the first trimester. Chile, Nicaragua and El Salvador ban abortion without exception.
Noteworthy is how the Times opens the story: “The bill would make this city one of the largest entities in Latin America to break with a long tradition of women resorting to illegal clinics and midwives to end unwanted pregnancies.” It would have been better to write: “The bill would make this city one of the largest entities in Latin America to break with a long tradition of upholding life.” Speaking of babies, Peggy Orenstein argues in the New York Times Magazine that babies have become the new feminist cause: Women in the post-pill, newly libbed 1960s and ’70s proclaimed “childlessness by choice” to be the ultimate emancipation, a defiant, even sexy stance. Several decades later, although living “child free” is surely an option, motherhood has been emphatically re-embraced, recast not only as an essential feminine right but also as a feminist one — to be claimed whether you are single or married, gay or straight, 25 or 59. Having children when we want them has become a symbol of our autonomy, more central to our concept of self than ever.
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