Bishop José Francisco González of Campeche said: “Among all the crimes that man can commit against life, procured abortion presents characteristics that make it particularly serious and ignominious.”
The congress of the western state of Campeche decriminalised abortion in the first 12 weeks of pregnancy. Bishop González warned any Catholic promoting the law they “should not participate in the sacraments”.
He called a press conference on 26 February after the diocese announced its “surprise” upon discovering the state penal code had been modified to change the law 48 hours earlier.
A vote on the issue which began at 11pm occurred “behind closed doors” in the middle of the region’s carnival season, González observed. He described the decision as “incomprehensible” from a social and legal perspective.
González, who was recently appointed the Archbishop of Tuxtla-Gutiérrez in the southern region of Chiapas, cited canon law saying any pro-abortion Catholic was “outside communion with the Church”, but he invited them to “reconsider and to rediscover their Catholic faith”.
He also called for the founding of a pro-life front, saying that life “should not be protected only by the mother, who carries [the child] in her womb, or by the father, who has procreated it, but by the whole society”.
González warned that if abortion is justified on the grounds that the unborn child is unwanted, “later on, society – and we are not far away – will propose doing something similar with children already born who do not behave well, or who are sickly, or who are facing a disability” as well as with the sick and elderly. “Finally, no life will be respected, for whatever reason it can be cut short,” he said.
Campeche’s Human Rights’ Commission promoted the law, which includes stronger penalties for coercing women to procure an abortion. It makes the state the twenty-first in Mexico to decriminalise abortion. Eight others have done so since Claudia Sheinbaum became Mexico’s first female president in October 2024.
However, Sheinbaum received praise from the country’s bishops for “her major openness to dialogue” in response to the crisis caused by US President Donald Trump’s polices barring immigrants and pursuing mass deportations.
A statement from the bishops’ conference on 24 February called for national unity in response to Trump’s measures.
They said it was “clear that he aims to pressure our country to achieve very concrete goals in his government plans: combat the activity of organised crime dedicated to drug trafficking, tackle the issue of migration and overcome the disadvantages in economic relations between the two countries that, according to their criteria, are unfavourable for North America”.