Rape Victims and Abortion in Mexico

But even the existing inadequate protections are not properly implemented.Police, public prosecutors, and health officials treat many rape victims dismissively and disrespectfully, regularly accusing girls and women of fabricating the rape. Specialized public prosecutor's offices on sexual violence, where they exist, are often in practice the only place to report sexual violence, further impeding access to justice for rape victims in more remote locations.Many victims of violence fear retribution from the perpetrator, especially if he is a family member.As a consequence, the vast majority of rape victims do not file a report at all.Generous estimates suggest 10 percent of rape victims file an official complaint.The real proportion is likely even less.

For rape victims who become pregnant but do not report the rape, legal abortion is ruled out.All jurisdictions in Mexico treat abortion as a crime-and some states indeed jail women who have illegal abortions-though access to legal abortion is considered a rape victim's right everywhere.Only three of Mexico's thirty-two independent jurisdictions have issued detailed legal and administrative guidelines on how to guarantee this right, and all require that the victims report the rape as an essential first step.In the remaining twenty-nine jurisdictions, confusion reigns.

When pregnant rape and incest victims do report the assault and insist that they want an abortion, they are sent on a veritable obstacle-course that materially diminishes their possibility of obtaining a legal abortion.The worst abuses occur in jurisdictions without administrative guidelines, where the void of guidance seems to terrify officials into inaction and leaves justice and health officials free to claim they have no mandate to facilitate access to legal abortion.

The full horror of what rape victims go through in their attempt to obtain a legal abortion-often including humiliation, degradation, and physical suffering-is in essence a second assault by the justice and health systems. Some girls, like "Graciela Hernndez" who was made pregnant by a father who raped her in hotel rooms every week for more than a year, lose access to legal abortion when prosecutors charge a perpetrator with incest instead of rape.Others, like "Marcela Gmez" seventeen-year-old daughter who was raped by a stranger, are passed from one public agency to another as none want to authorize the abortion.Some are bounced back and forth until the pregnancy is too advanced to be interrupted safely and legally.Others are threatened with jail for procuring a legal abortion, and many are told, without cause, that an abortion at any time during the pregnancy could kill them.

Public officials at times aggressively discourage abortion after rape, including for very young rape victims.A social worker in Jalisco told Human Rights Watch: "We had the case of an eleven or twelve-year-old girl who had been raped by her brother. She came here wanting to have an abortion, but we worked with her psychologically, and in the end she kept her baby.Her little child-sibling."


Taken from- http://www.hrw.org/en/node/11460/section/2