The runs in Mexico

By BRUCE LOWITT

The 11,000 “runners” disqualified from last month’s Mexico City Marathon for taking shortcuts and using mass transit were, it turns out, pregnant women and partners from Texas and elsewhere in the United States seeking safe legal abortions.

“With so many of our states attacking women’s reproductive rights, we have to bypass those asshole legislatures by heading to Mexico, where its Supreme Court just voted to decriminalize abortion,” said Alethea Anne Swift, vice president of Avow, Inc., a non-profit seeking to secure unrestricted abortion access for every Texan.

Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, attempting to stem the stampede of women over the southern border and into Mexico, ordered a doubling of the razor wire and wrecking ball-sized buoys along the Rio Grande originally meant to stop migrants from entering his state to take advantage of its egregiously low minimum wage.

Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador countered by announcing the opening of scores of incarcerated former drug trafficker Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman’s tunnels between Mexico and California, Texas, Arizona and New Mexico.

“We don’t want to disclose where in those states the tunnels begin or end,” Obrador said, “because lunatic gringo antiabortionists will just screw everything up. But I can say that in anticipation of this month’s decision by our Supreme Court we quietly moved the United States’ entry points into the tunnels by digging new ones.”

He said the locations have been released only to the most trusted pro-choice organizations and that women and men from at least a dozen additional states have begun using the tunnels.

Thousands of them, rushing alongside actual marathoners, were grabbed by race officials during the Aug. 27 race as they ran or walked or, in some cases, used cars or public transportation, as they passed through the checkpoints set up along the 26.2-mile course.

“This guy put his paws on me and told me I wasn’t legal,” Miriam Fernbern of Wichita, Kansas, said. “I asked him if it was legal to show him what my husband used that made me this way, then I kicked him in the nuts so hard that he might never put a woman in the situation I’m in.”

While most of the marathoners welcomed the unexpected crowd of Americans, a few had complaints. Marisol Romero Rosales, a two-time Pan American Games winner, finished 13^th in the women’s standings, “but if that perra hadn’t slammed into me while she was screaming at her boyfriend for not wearing a condom I’d have been in the top ten,” she said.

Although the court didn’t announce its decision until Sept. 7, people within the judicial system knew, as one anonymous source said, “Nuestros jueces mexicanos estaban dispuestos a señalar con el dedo a esos idiotas con togas de Washington.” (“Our Mexican judges were willing to give the finger to those jerks wearing robes in Washington.”)

And as word of the impending ruling spread throughout Mexico City and its suburbs, dozens of hospitals and abortion clinics began advertising their services with “We do takeout” commercials on U.S. radio stations.

In Washington, U.S. Supreme Court Associate Justice Amy Coney Barrett said she has been contacted by Wyoming Rep. Harriet Hageman, R-Chastisement, regarding additional ways to stop abortions, asking about the viability of a law that would ban intercourse between a man and woman.

“Hey, wait a minute,” Associate Justice Brett Kavanaugh said. “You try to do that and you’ll kill the beer, wine and liquor industries, not to mention my weekends.”