The decision comes two years after the court upheld a challenge to existing law in the northern state of Coahuila. It had determined that criminal penalties for abortion were unlawful.

Since then, Mexico’s states and federal government have been sluggish to remove penal legislation.

The recent verdict makes abortion lawful in all 32 states.

The Supreme Court ruled that denying the possibility of termination violated women’s human rights.

The decision allows the federal healthcare system to provide abortions. Women’s rights activists have praised it.

In 2007, Mexico City became the country’s first state to decriminalise abortion, and a dozen more followed suit.

However, “many women do not know that they have this right because local governments have not carried out publicity campaigns about it,” women’s rights campaigner Sara Lovera told AFP news agency.

“That is why today’s Supreme Court decision is significant.”

The new verdict is sure to enrage Mexico’s more conservative politicians as well as the Catholic Church in the Latin American country with the second largest Catholic population.

However, the Church’s influence has waned in recent years, and the country’s government considers itself firmly secular.

The term “green wave” refers to a movement in Latin America toward relaxing abortion regulations.

Abortion is allowed in Colombia, Cuba, Uruguay, and Argentina, though the frontrunner in Argentina’s presidential election in October, Javier Milei, wants to outlaw it.

Some countries permit abortions in certain instances, such as rape or health hazards, while others, such as El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua, Haiti, and the Dominican Republic, openly prohibit them.

The improvements in Mexico and other Latin American countries contrast with the situation in the United States, where the historic 1973 Roe v. Wade decision ensuring the right to abortion nationally was overturned by the Supreme Court last year.