Abortion: no news is good news

I ran across an excellent source of Mexican reporting, out of Minneapolis, of all places.  Johnny Hazard (that can’t be a real name) writes for the Pulse of the Twin Cities.  Contrarary to the “big protests” reported in the “mainstream press,” the real news is that there is very little debate in Mexico over decriminalizing abortion:

A proposal to legalize abortion during the first 12 weeks of pregnancy has the support of five of the seven parties represented in the legislative assembly of Mexico City and will likely pass on April 24.

The proposal comes from legislators of the Partido de la Revolución Democrática (PRD) and Partido de la Revolución Institucional (PRI) and has the support of three smaller center-left parties. There has been little grassroots feminist organizing to promote the change, but even less protest from the usual suspects. The Catholic hierarchy promoted, with free publicity from most of the compliant news media, a march on Sunday, March 25 that only drew about 4,000 people. (The second installment of the National Convention for Democracy, an outgrowth of the movement that centers around Andrés Manuel López Obrador, against electoral fraud and its related vices, drew around 300,000 people the same day. Guess which event got more media coverage?

…

The Catholic Church still wields economic and political power, but has much less influence over personal lives. Eighty- five percent of Mexicans continue to call themselves Catholics—down from 90 percent. (The figure is probably much lower in Mexico City.) But only 6 percent attend church once a week or more. The history of anticlerical reforms in Mexico goes back to the mid-19th century, when the constitution of 1857 stripped religious weddings of legal validity—many people now have a religious and a civil ceremony—and seized the riches of the church.

Hazard is the one of the few foreign reporter I’ve seen who’s caught on that Mexico is a “normal” country, no more “Catholic” than other overwhelmingly Catholic nations like France or the Czech Republic.

Every AP (and Reuters and even AFP) story repeats “Mexico is 90% Catholic” with the same mindlessness they used to call Vicente Fox “Vicente Fox, whose election ended 70 years of one-party rule” (a fine point, but the PRI didn’t exist befor 1948, which made a hash of the arithmatic. The “one party” was a coalition of the Revolutionary winners, and included several parties for many years. The only thing unique about the PRI was that it was able to win– by hook or by crook — about 70% of the vote over the years. There were always minority parties in Congress, and in state and municipal offices).

I think the word I’m looking for is “meme.” Which I guess means “easy explanation by way of a phrase”. And, the “easy explanation” is usually wrong, or incomplete. Not that Johnny Hazard … or I… or anyone else has the entire story. I write about Mexico because it is so complex, and there is more than even an underemployed obsessive can handle.

I’ve had to go through some pretty odd sources… everything from provincial newspapers and conversations with ambulantes or people on the ruta or read through neo-fascist websites, and look through “solidarity with the third world” position papers or look at what the tourist sites say. And read everything and talk to everybody. And still sometimes I miss what’s NOT there.

Johnny Hazard, whoever he is, should be better known than he is. I guess I’ve got to add Minnesota alternative press publications to my regular reading list.