July 7, 2006 Volume 8, Number 26
Hope for Mexico?
Dear Colleague:
Mexico’s mostly pro-life presidential candidate seems to have won. Is there hope he will pursue pro-family policies in increasingly childless Mexico?
Steven W. Mosher President
Though his primary leftist opponent is demanding a hand recount and the national election commission could decide to order one or some other action, it seems that Felipe Calderón will become the next president of Mexico on December 1. Calderón barely achieved a plurality of the vote, triumphing over leftist-populist candidate Andrés Manuel López Obrador of the Democratic Revolution Party (PRD) by less than one point. The candidate of the once-dominant Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) came in a distant third. Calderón will succeed President Vicente Fox; both are from the National Action Party (PAN). In 2000, Fox was the first man to be elected president of Mexico in anything resembling a fair contest. Mexican presidents cannot run for re-election.
Calderón’s victory bodes well for Mexico’s economy, and more importantly, her public morality. ?Yes, he’s against abortion,? said a spokeswoman for pro-life group Comité Nacional Provida México. ?He talks about contraception. He says that’s good. But he’s against abortion.?
It’s unclear whether Calderón thinks contraception is okay morally or just doesn?t want to ban it. He is a devout Catholic and daily Mass attendee, reported LifeSiteNews.com, July 6, which said, ?Calderón, a relatively young (43) Harvard grad with three children all under ten, and a wife who is also a PAN legislator, did not shy away from his faith during the elections. ?I am a man of convictions who wants what is best for his children and those of all Mexicans,? he said during the campaign.?
A national politician not shying away from his faith is not as common in Mexico as religious statistics would suggest. For decades, the Catholic Church has been persecuted by the secularist Mexican government, with Fox easing restrictions on Catholics? religious freedom in recent years.
López Obrador, the oldest of eight children, hasn?t openly endorsed legalizing abortion and so-called same-sex ?marriage,? but has suggested holding public referenda on the matter?definitely a step in the wrong direction from the officially pro-life, though inactive, Fox.
Unlike many in the United States, in Latin America, and elsewhere, Calderón has not fallen for the dishonest argument that the abortifacient morning-after pill (MAP) is actually just ?emergency contraception,? nor is he in favor of perversion. Said the pro-life spokeswoman, ?He’s against the morning-after pill. And he’s against homosexuality. . . . He said he won?t let abortion become legal.? In Mexico, abortion is legal only in cases of rape, incest, or to save the life of the mother.
Calderón, the youngest of five children, is best known for wanting to pursue pro-free market, pro-business policies in order to develop Mexico’s poor economy. He has a master’s degree in economics from the Autonomous Technical Institute of Mexico and a master’s in public administration from Harvard. If successful, a pro-business strategy would staunch the northern flow of Mexican migrants seeking jobs, a flow that continues unabated even as Mexico’s birthrate dips below replacement level (if you think of Mexico as a land of fertile peasant women with large families, think again). Will Calderón, considered nationalistic by many American experts, recognize the need for future workers in order to enable the long-term prosperity of his country? Will he implement policies intended to raise the Mexican birthrate? We don?t know, because as far as we can tell he has not talked about this issue, but he is likely to be more sympathetic to such ideas than other heads of state.
We hope that his Catholic beliefs and the practical matter of providing for Mexico’s future will prompt him to end the forced sterilizations of poor Mexican women that go on in government-funded health clinics, a topic on which we have reported in the past. As the newspaper of the Archdiocese of Mexico City put it years ago, ?There is a new, more subtle tyranny, as evil as Nazi Germany or the Stalinist regime, which is the domination of nations through birth control. Forced sterilization is one of the methods used as a means to steal from the poor the right to have children.?
Joseph A. D’Agostino is Vice President for Communications at the Population Research Institute.
