Mexican state governor vetoes anti-abortion law

MEXICO CITY (Reuters) -- The governor of Mexican President-elect Vicente Fox's home state on Tuesday vetoed a highly contentious anti-abortion bill that had awakened fears the ultra-right might try to impose its Catholic ethics on the incoming administration.

A spokesman said Gov. Ramon Martin of the central agricultural state of Guanajuato sent the bill, which would have jailed women who aborted after being raped, to the garbage heap after an opinion poll found most people opposed it.

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"The governor decided to send the reform back to (the state) Congress for their reflections," the spokesman said.

The Guanajuato anti-abortion law was approved in early August and sparked a furious debate in Catholic Mexico about abortion.

Mexican federal law allows abortion in cases of rape, serious health problems or potential birth defects. But the government has been unable to enforce it in the states.

The Guanajuato blanket ban on abortion also aroused fears that Fox's conservative National Action Party (PAN), seen as very close to the Roman Catholic church, might try to give religion greater prominence again in national life.

Wanting to limit the enormous power of the Catholic Church in Mexico following the Spanish conquest in the 1500s, authorities in the middle of the last century seized church property and banned priests from wearing their robes in public. The separation of church and state led to a bloody war in the 1920s.

Passions ran so high following the Guanajuato state initiative that the leftist administration of Mexico City, run since 1997 by the Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD), soon afterward approved a law that did the precise opposite -- making abortions easier for women in special circumstances.

Fox was elected Mexico's first opposition president in 71 years in a July 2 ballot after he defeated the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI). Previously a governor of Guanajuato, Fox takes office Dec. 1.

Copyright 2000 Reuters. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.

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