(NewsNation) — As some states ban abortion access in the United States, activist organizations are working to send Americans south of the border, where the Mexico Supreme Court recently decriminalized the procedure.
Combined efforts — both official and unofficial — to expand abortion access for the U.S. and Mexico are longstanding. Shifting policies throughout both nations’ histories have led to the creation of networks dedicated to making abortion available to people on either side of the border.
It’s happening now in border states like Arizona and Texas, said Lina-Maria Murillo, assistant professor of gender, women’s and sexuality studies as well as Latin studies at the University of Iowa.
“We know through informal networks, that groups of activists and others are connecting with formal networks in Mexico… helping to bridge that healthcare gap and provide people a much more systemized way of accessing mainly abortion medication,” Murillo said.
The international nonprofit group MSI Reproductive Choices has plans to open a clinic in Cancun.
“We have had clients come from the United States to find the care they either cannot find or afford in the U.S.,” MSI United States President Amanda Seller said. “Our program in Mexico has heard that other service providers are seeing more Americans coming to Mexico for abortions.”
Mexico’s Supreme Court removed all criminal penalties for abortion in early September, after ruling that existing national laws against the procedure violated women’s rights. The decision comes more than one year after the U.S. Supreme Court effectively overturned a landmark case that protected the right to an abortion under the nation’s constitution.
Mexico’s ruling could make it easier for people who live in U.S. states to circumvent new abortion laws.
Currently, there’s no comprehensive data detailing how many Americans travel out of the country for abortion services. Existing research, however, offers a glimpse at how frequently people travel between states for access.
Several states enacted measures to keep and expand abortion access after Roe v. Wade saw increases in abortion. That’s likely because residents took advantage of the improved access as traveled from other states for care, according to the Guttmacher Institute.
Colorado, for example, put in place several measures to enshrine abortion access and saw an 89% increase in abortions since 2020. That’s compared to 8% in the previous three-year period between 2017 and 2020.
Although it’s not uncommon for people to travel from the U.S. to Mexico for medicine and procedures (some border towns share services like dentists and schools), some states and cities are trying to make it harder to travel out of restricted areas for an abortion.
Upon Roe’s reversal, decisions about abortion access fell to individual states, 13 of which already had so-called trigger laws in place to ban the medical procedure. Legislators and local officials in some areas have continued to call for harsher penalties and tighter restrictions.
A town in Texas, for example, recently tried to make it illegal to travel on certain roads en route to abortion services — dubbed “trafficking laws” by supporters.
Travel and the shifting landscape of abortion care in both the U.S. and Mexico, however, are likely to continue curbing abortion access, at least temporarily.
“Some (Mexican) states have very conservative policies… so it remains to be seen if clinics will begin to appear like they did in the years before Roe v. Wade,” Murillo said.
Mexico’s abortion laws still vary state-by-state and traveling over the border could be an unrealistic alternative for some people. The country, however, has a longer history of state-financed healthcare, Murillo noted.
“So, since the (Mexican) federal government has essentially decriminalized access to abortion, I imagine that state-run clinics and those who have financial support from the Mexican state will be given funding to perform these kinds of procedures,” she said.
It’s increasingly common for Americans to travel abroad for medical treatment, according to the U.S. Department of State.
Although Mexico has many elective and cosmetic facilities that are on par with those found in the U.S., the quality of care can vary, the State Department warned. Anyone planning to undergo surgery in Mexico should be sure emergency medical facilities are available and the professionals they’re assessing are accredited and qualified.
