In Guam, the nearest domestic abortion clinic is 4,000 miles away. How will Roe’s reversal change the U.S. territory?
The Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v.
The Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade, which had made abortion a constitutionally protected right, could have a chilling effect on reproductive rights in Guam.
Advocates say women have already been living under a de facto ban in the largely Catholic U.S. Pacific Island territory and fear it could get more restrictive.
No surgical abortion has been performed on the island since 2018, when the last doctor trained to provide the procedure retired, according to the ACLU and the Bureau of Women’s Affairs.
“People in Guam were already living in a post-Roe world,” Alexa Kolbi-Molinas, deputy director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s Reproductive Freedom Project, told NBC Asian America. “This is what we will see again if extremist politicians enact new abortion bans and force women into second-class status.”
The Supreme Court ruling might have ramifications for Pacific Islanders in the two other U.S. Pacific territories, the Northern Mariana Islands and American Samoa. Neither territory has legal protections for abortion, and both have laws prohibiting the practice in the absence of Roe v. Wade.
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