Mexico’s supreme court has decriminalized abortion across the country, two years after ruling that abortion was not a crime in one northern state.
That earlier ruling had set off a grinding process of decriminalizing abortion state by state. Last week, the central state of Aguascalientes became the 12th state to decriminalize the procedure. Judges in states that still criminalize abortion will have to take account of the top court’s ruling.
The supreme court wrote on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter, that it had decided that “the legal system that criminalized abortion in the Federal Penal Code is unconstitutional, [because] it violates the human rights of women and people with the ability to gestate.”
Wow, Mexican women have more rights than American women. Plus they also have universal healthcare.
Unfortunately that healthcare is shitty and way over capacity. But still, at least we have something we can improve, instead of just nothing at all.
Can you describe that? I feel like everyone says that about Canada, Europe, etc. But when I try to nail down what they are afraid of, they are like, “if I need a knee surgery I want it NOW! That could take months in Canada!”
Is it like that, or are there like actual life threatening problems being unaddressed?
Some of the most recent examples: recently there has been a critical shortage of psychiatric medicines. Lots of people didn’t have access to their antidepressants, antipsychotics, and lots of other medicines you can’t skip without disastrous effects. While I don’t use public health care, I still had trouble finding some of my prescriptions. The equipment and buildings are in disrepair, because of lack of funding and corruption. This year there was a scandal because a girl died crushed by a elevator in a clinic. Then they found lots of corruption with the company that installed the elevators. Some weird things have happened, for example, a woman went for abdominal pain and when she woke up, the doctors had amputated both of her legs. Also, it’s common that women deliver their babies outside the hospital because it is over capacity. Etc, etc…
In Canada, yes stuff like joint surgeries can take a little longer to queue… But I have never actually known anyone to die on a waitlist and the turn around for things like cancer is pretty short.
The trade off is stuff like there was a friend’s Dad that needed an emergency medical transfer from a smaller rural hospital. They did it by helicopter ambulance and he spent just shy of three months in hospital in intensive care. He didn’t have any additional medical insurance but his family never needed pay for anything. Furthermore the hospital contracted with a hotel near by so his family could stay in a nice place walking distance to the hospital for around 20 bucks a night.
We as a country have a very small population, about the population of the state of California spread over more land mass than the entirety of the US and then some. There are challenges with that and the fact our dollar is weaker so it’s overall less lucrative, but the turn around regarding knee surgeries make a lot of sense once you realize that. Changing our system to a pay-per-play would not necessarily alleviate the wait times.
