Responding to the conservative backlash to women's sexual and reproductive rights, including abortion, throughout Mexico at the state level through strategic and collaborative research and advocacy

In 2007, to address maternal mortality and morbidity due to unsafe abortions, the Mexico City Federal District (D.F.) legislature amended the district's penal code to decriminalize abortion in the first trimester. In response to this legislation, seventeen of Mexico's 32 states have amended their state constitutions to redefine human life as beginning with conception thus actively criminalizing abortion. These new restrictions signify a dangerous backlash that affects the 45 million women who live outside the city limits by enacting an aggressive anti-choice strategy against safe abortion, certain methods of contraception, and more broadly women's human rights. To address this backlash, a multidisciplinary Emory student research team will be researching Mexican public opinion and policy with the National Pro-Choice Alliance members, Population Council, Católicas para el Derecho de Decidir (Catholics for Choice, CDD), Grupo de Información en Reproducción Elegida (Reproductive Choice Information Group, GIRE), and Instituto Nacional de Salud Pública (National Institute for Public Health, INSP) in D.F. during summer 2010.

This project will culminate in a pro-choice advocacy framework that addresses recent anti-abortion backlash across Mexico. A coordinated effort from specialists in law, ethics, media, and research executed by an interdisciplinary team of four Emory students from the schools of public health, law, and theology will work in collaboration with Population Council, GIRE, and CDD, respectively. The public health scholars will contribute to the final advocacy framework through qualitative public opinion surveys, the law scholar through media discourse research and the theology scholar through scripture and ethics research.