Mexican Supreme Court Strikes Down Adoption Ban

Mexico's Supreme Court issued a 9-1 ruling Tuesday that a Campeche state law barring same-sex couples from adopting is unconstitutional. The court cited children's rights as the basis for its decision. The challenge to the 2013 law was brought by the state's human rights commission.

Presiding Judge Luis Maria Aguila said in the ruling, according to Latin American news network TeleSUR:

"I see no problem for a child to be adopted in a society of co-existence, which has precisely this purpose. Are we going to prefer to have children in the street, which according to statistics exceed 100,000? We attend, of course, and perhaps with the same intensity or more, to the interests of the child."

Mexico's Supreme Court recently ruled that bans on same-sex marriage are unconstitutional, in a decision issued shortly before the United States Supreme Court ruled in favor of marriage equality. While the court's decision didn't technically legalize same-sex marriages nationwide, it does allow gay and lesbian couples to challenge their state's ban successfully.

The marriage equality ruling was issued as a "jurisprudential thesis" to Mexican states, informing them that any laws which define the purpose of marriage to be "procreation, and or defines [marriage] as celebrated between a man and a woman, is unconstitutional."

Same-sex marriage is already legal in Mexico City and the states of Chihuahua, Coahuila, Guerrero, and Quintana Roo.