The ruling is seen as a travesty to many of its citizens living in the second-largest Catholic country in the world, in which nearly 80 percent of Mexicans identify as Catholic.
Irma Barrientos, director of the Civil Association for the Rights of the Conceived, decried the ruling and said opponents will continue to fight against it.
"We’re not going to stop," Barrientos said. "Let's remember what happened in the United States. After 40 years, the Supreme Court reversed its abortion decision, and we're not going to stop until Mexico guarantees the right to life from the moment of conception."
The high court decision requires federal agencies to offer abortion procedures to patients. The approximately 20 Mexican states that currently have abortion criminalized will have to abide by the Supreme Court's decision, although additional legal work is required to rid all penalties, according to the Associated Press.
The Supreme Court announced its ruling on X, formerly known as Twitter, writing that "the legal system that criminalized abortion in the Federal Penal Code is unconstitutional, (because) it violates the human rights of women and people with the ability to gestate."
The verdict was rendered two years after the court determined that abortion was legal in one northern state. The gradual decriminalization process began with that decision, state by state, which resulted in federal legalization.
Former Supreme Court justice and current senator, Olga Sánchez Cordero, praised the decision, stating on X that it was a step toward "a more just society in which the rights of all are respected."
While pro-life citizens decried the decision, pro-abortion activists and organizations applauded the ruling and vowed to take their fight to the state level.
Mexico's National Institute for Women called the decision a "big step" for gender equality and wrote on X: "Today is a day of victory and justice for Mexican women!"
Fernanda Díaz de León, sub-director and legal expert for women's rights group IPAS, said the ruling is "a very important step" but "we need to wait to see how this is going to be applied and how far it reaches," the outlet reports.
Mexico's decision to legalize abortion comes after a decades-long fight that had a ripple effect on South American regions, such as the religious countries of Argentina and Colombia, which legalized the procedures in 2020 and 2022.
