Human Rights and the Right to Life: Strategic Secularism in Mexico's Partido Acción Nacional, 1990–2008

ABSTRACT In the 1990s, Mexican conservative politicians robustly argued against legal abortion. A feature of their strategy was the appropriation of human rights arguments to assert protections for the ‘unborn’. The adoption of human rights aligned with the international pro‐life movement's assertion that these agreements extended to embryos. Their position developed concurrently with feminist demands for gendered interpretations of human rights. Pro‐life advocates countered feminists by holding that fetal personhood protections secured women's rights, where women's most important role was still motherhood. Thus, pro‐life figures insisted that keeping abortion illegal protected both ‘unborn’ persons and women in a gender binary system.