Judicial Federalism and Abortion in Mexico and the United States

As the US Supreme Court was preparing to overturn Roe v. Wade , the Mexican Supreme Court issued a series of sweeping rulings to liberalize abortion—part of a larger trend across Latin America (Daby and Moseley 2022; Fernandez Anderson 2017; Reuterswärd 2020; Ruibal 2014). Mexico has created a nationwide standard of access to abortion services, whereas the United States has abandoned universal legal abortion and embraced a patchwork system in which each state has different laws regulating reproductive healthcare. Why are these two neighbors on such divergent paths? This contribution to the symposium compares the ways that federalism and judicial politics have interacted in Mexico and the United States to explain the different trajectories of abortion policy. The divergent paths of the United States and Mexico can be explained by the two countries’ different experiences with democracy and political and institutional differences between the judiciaries. A different civil-society and constitutional context also has played a role.