Feminist Collectives March in Mexico City Demanding Legal, Safe Abortion Nationwide

Mexico City — Dozens of women from feminist collectives marched through the capital on Monday to mark the Global Day of Action for Access to Legal and Safe Abortion, demanding that Mexican authorities guarantee free, safe and legal terminations for women across the country.

Under the slogan “Marchemos Juntas 28S” (Let’s March Together, Sept. 28), the demonstrators set out from the Monumento a la Revolución and the Glorieta de las Mujeres que Luchan before converging on the city’s main square, the Zócalo. They called for respect for women’s right to decide freely about their own bodies and for the Mexican state to permit free, no-cost and safe abortions.

Most of the marchers wore green handkerchiefs on their faces, heads or wrists — the symbol of the campaign to decriminalize and legalize abortion nationwide. Abortion is currently decriminalized in only 24 of Mexico’s 32 states.

Handmade signs carried during the march included: “Giving birth out of obligation does not save any nation”; “We have to abort the system”; “Sex education to decide, contraceptives so as not to abort, legal, safe and free abortion so as not to die”; and “Having children without thinking is normalized — the real pro-life position is to ask yourself: a child is not a game, should I be a father?”

The march was largely peaceful, although some masked participants identified as members of the Black Bloc painted graffiti on street furniture and on the fences surrounding monuments and historic buildings in the capital’s downtown area.

On arriving at the Zócalo, some demonstrators burned underwear as a symbol of protest against deaths caused by clandestine abortions, the lack of information about and access to long-acting contraceptives, and the broader struggle for reproductive rights.

According to the World Health Organization, about 73 million induced abortions take place worldwide every year, many of them performed in clandestine conditions that put women’s health and lives at risk.

Similar demonstrations took place in other parts of Mexico, where collectives and activists pressed authorities to recognize the right to choose — on abortion and on other issues affecting women’s bodies.

Organizers said Mexico remains a machista country in which men still seek to dictate what women may or may not do with their own bodies, which is why such marches continue to be held.