How Mexico's Top Judge, Raised Catholic, Became an Abortion Rights Champion

Influenced by feminists close to him, the head of the country's Supreme Court helped pave the way for the decriminalization of the procedure.

MEXICO CITY - When the Chief Justice of Mexico's Supreme Court began voting in favor of abortion rights, his toughest opponents were the most close to him.

His sister asked why he wanted to kill babies. His brother, a civil engineer, lost customers. Friends prayed for his religious conversion in group chats.

"No one could explain," Chief Justice Arturo Zaldívar Lelo de Larrea said, "when exactly I lost my way".

When the United States Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, this was the cornerstone of a remarkable trend: as the United States increasingly restricts access to abortion, much of the world has moved in the opposite direction.

The ruling cemented the status of the United States, long a model for those seeking to expand reproductive rights, as a global exception – part of a small subset of nations which over the past two decades have made it harder for women to end their pregnancies.

But just as amazing as this reversal is the evolution of and the socially conservative countries of Latin America that now find themselves at the forefront of expanding abortion rights around the world.

There are fewer more telling examples than Mexico, the country with the second largest Roman Catholic population in the world, after the Brazil. Mexico's Supreme Court decriminalized abortion in a unanimous decision last year that paved the way for the procedure to be legalized nationwide.

“ We are all in favor of life,” Chief Justice Zaldívar told the court at the time. "The only thing is that some of us are in favor of women's lives being one in which their dignity is respected, in which they can fully exercise their rights."

Many forces have driven Mexico's transformation. Decades of feminist activism have reshaped the national conversation around the violence women routinely face and the empowerment they deserve. Rights groups have helped put abortion cases on the Supreme Court's agenda. The conservative judges left the court.

ImageA march in Mexico City in March for the international day of the woman. A growing feminist movement in Mexico has helped bring women's struggles into the national conversation.Credit...Victoria Razo for The New York Times changing the nation on abortion, the CJ may seem like a surprising player. But Mr. Zaldívar, raised by practicing Catholic parents in a staunchly conservative state, has become one of Mexico's strongest abortion rights advocates.

"He took advantage of the power he had as chief justice of the court to advance a lot of things in favor of gender equity," said Ana Laura Magaloni, professor of law at the Autonomous Technological Institute of Mexico. . "He will go down in history for that."

Mr. Zaldívar said he now sees himself as "a free thinker of Christian background with a Buddhist orientation". He believes that labeling abortion as murder "dilutes the humanity of women by virtue of a religious belief".

His personal evolution reflects the radical change of a nation forced to reconcile faith and conservative values ​​with an inflexible demand...