In a landmark ruling issued orally yesterday, the Eastern Caribbean Supreme Court for
the Commonwealth of Dominica decriminalised abortion access in cases of rape, incest,
foetal impairment and to protect a woman’s life and health.
A summary of the decision made available to Kiskadee Watch said that the court has now made it possible for women and girls to access abortion care through their healthcare providers without the fear or risk of prosecution.
It is said to be the first time a court in the English-speaking Caribbean has ever declared an abortion law unconstitutional for violating women’s and girls’ rights to freedom from discrimination on the basis of sex, life, liberty, security of the person and protection of the law. The government of Dominica now has six months to bring the legal framework into compliance with the court’s ruling.
Reflecting on the court’s judgment, one of the claimants in the case who will remain anonymous, stated: “As women we no longer have to feel trapped with a decision we did not make for ourselves. We no longer have to be ashamed of a choice we made. I cannot imagine the life I would have right now had I not had the opportunity to have an abortion– even where I faced the risk of being imprisoned.”
The colonial-era abortion law in Dominica created a near total ban on abortions with the only exception being made for pregnancies over 28 weeks when the procedure was necessary to save the life of the woman. The laws also subjected women, girls and health care
providers to imprisonment of up to 10 years if convicted, the summary said.
While the laws were largely unenforced, they had been used arbitrarily to prosecute women,
girls and their health care providers, the summary said.
Anika Gray, one of the lawyers leading the litigation, expressed gratitude that in coming to its
decision, the court made it clear that “the laws are an affront to women’ s bodily and
reproductive autonomy, and constituted unjustifiable sex discrimination not only because men
are not subjected to similar restrictions on their sexual and reproductive health but because the law placed a disproportionate burden on women’ s reproductive function.”The legal team
also included Rishi Dass SC, Sasha Sukhram and Dawn Yearwood.
With this ground-breaking judgment, the path has now been cleared for courts in the nine
other Caribbean countries with criminal abortion laws to take the same approach.
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