Decision to remove abortion from federal penal code comes amid trend in Latin America of loosening restrictions on procedure

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.”