Dem
51
GOP
49
Abortion is legal in many countries, but it was a mixed bag in Mexico. Until yesterday, it was legal in 12 states and illegal in the other 20 states. Now due to a decision of the Mexican Supreme Court, it is legal in all 32 states.
So how does that affect U.S. politics? An abortion is de facto nearly impossible to obtain in Texas now. However, Texas has a 1,241-mile-long border with Mexico. San Antonio, TX, is a 3-hour drive from Nuevo Laredo. Austin is 4 hours from there. Corpus Christi is 2½ hours from Matamoros, Mexico. McAllen, TX, has a bridge right into Hidalgo, Mexico. Get the idea?
It won't take long for women in Texas to discover that abortions are available in Mexico. It also won't take long for Mexican doctors to set up shop along the border running abortion clinics, in some cases staffed by doctors who merely write prescriptions for abortion pills, presumably with minipharmacies right in the clinic to fill them. In addition, most costs are lower in Mexico than in the U.S., so Mexican doctors can charge less than U.S. doctors and still make a good living.
Getting a Mexican abortion may become as popular as getting a Mexican divorce used to be, back when they were hard to get in the U.S. One of us, (V), remembers the first time he drove from California to Tijuana many years ago. The entire road on the Mexican side was almost wall-to-wall billboards with signs like:
There were dozens of giant billboards along the road. None of them were in Spanish. All of them had photos of smiling and friendly-looking Mexican lawyers. Could we get a repeat performance, only with doctors instead of lawyers this time? Maybe. (V)