Melissa Padilla (University of San Diego School of Law) has posted Reproductive Rights are Human Rights: The Critical Role of International Human Rights Law in Decriminalizing Abortion in Argentina and Mexico on SSRN. Here is the abstract:
Access to legal abortion services is a fundamental component of individuals’ reproductive rights, which have been interpreted to be a human right rooted within eleven human rights enumerated within several human rights treaties. Although Argentina and Mexico ratified most of the treaties interpreted to recognize individuals’ reproductive rights in the 1980s, they only recently decriminalized abortion in 2020 and 2021 respectively. This begs the question: what led Argentine and Mexican decisionmakers to fulfill their States’ international legal obligations to decriminalize abortions forty or so years after assuming their international obligations? The self-reporting requirement within human rights treaties is a central piece of the puzzle. This case study walks readers through the status of abortion access in Argentina and Mexico decades leading up the decriminalization of abortion and demonstrates the gradual progressive shift towards the decriminalization of abortion that coincided with both countries complying with human rights treaties’ reporting requirements, demonstrating how the informal enforcement cycle within many human rights treaties can be used as a tool to protect controversial human rights.
