Caroline Beer, Making Abortion Laws in Mexico: Salience and Autonomy in the Policymaking Process

What explains the changing policymaking process for abortion law in Mexico over the past century? From the 1930s until the 1970s, abortion laws across the thirty-two federal entities in Mexico were nearly identical. Between 1979 and 1987, almost half of the states liberalized abortion laws, but very little attention was paid to the reforms. Abortion suddenly emerged as a central polarizing conflict in the aftermath of the 2000 presidential elections that ushered in multiparty democracy. This article provides a comparative analysis of criminal codes and abortion law through time and across the Mexican states. It builds on the theoretical insights of U.S. public policy research on federalism and Mexican research on policymaking to present a comparative framework for understanding policymaking in federal systems. The article argues that policy salience and policy autonomy are key variables for understanding different types of policymaking processes.