The Caribbean region faces a stark, decades-long paradox when it comes to abortion policy: it boasts the highest abortion rate globally, according to data from the Guttmacher Institute, yet has some of the world’s most strict, criminalized abortion laws on the books. For local reproductive justice advocates, this disconnect offers clear evidence that punitive, outright bans on abortion have been an unmitigated failure. Criminalization has never stopped abortions from occurring, meaning it has failed to uphold the very commitment to the sanctity of life that conservative opponents of reform often cite.
Despite this documented failure, conservative religious leaders across the region continue to defend the status quo, arguing that legalizing abortion would send an unacceptable moral message to the public. But advocates with ASPIRE, a pro-choice Caribbean reproductive health NGO registered in Dominica and five other neighboring nations, push back on this reasoning: opponents prioritize ideological dogma over actual protection of life, given that research and real-world experience from countries including Barbados and Guyana confirm that liberalizing abortion laws correlates with a reduction in total abortion rates.
Recently, ASPIRE won a landmark constitutional challenge to Dominica’s existing abortion ban, securing a favorable ruling from the nation’s High Court. Justice Zainab Jawara-Alami, who presided over the case, took a measured, incremental approach to reform rather than scrapping the country’s restrictive abortion laws entirely. Where ASPIRE had asked the court to strike down the existing laws as fully unconstitutional, clearing the way for the Dominican government to draft new, permissive legislation, the justice opted for a narrower ruling.
Instead of declaring sections 56 and 57 of Dominica’s abortion law outright unconstitutional, Justice Jawara-Alami ruled that the provisions cannot remain in force in their current form, and ordered the Dominican government to amend the laws to resolve their constitutional inconsistency. The ruling specifically identifies four circumstances where continuing a pregnancy violates a pregnant person’s constitutional rights: cases of rape, incest, severe fetal anomaly, and situations where the pregnant person’s physical or mental health is at risk.
ASPIRE acknowledges that Justice Jawara-Alami’s ruling is legally sound: it is well-supported by existing legal precedent, aligned with the long legal tradition of incremental judicial reform, and stays firmly within the bounds of the court’s constitutional authority. Advocates applaud the step forward for reproductive rights that the ruling represents.
Even so, the organization argues that the narrow scope of the decision fails to address the grim on-the-ground reality of unsafe abortion in Dominica, disconnecting sound legal reasoning from the harsh experiences of pregnant people across the country. ASPIRE’s own data collected for the case shows that at least 83 percent of the reasons that compel Dominican women to seek abortions are not covered by the new ruling, and will remain criminalized under current law.
Breakdown of the data shows that 40 percent of abortions are sought for timing-related reasons, such as having recently given birth, needing to complete an education, or other personal timing concerns. Another 24 percent are driven by socioeconomic instability: patients simply do not have the financial or social resources to support a child at the time of pregnancy. An additional 20 percent of abortions are sought due to patient age, whether the patient is too young or too old to safely carry a pregnancy to term. None of these cases will be decriminalized under the High Court’s ruling.
Worsening the contradiction, ASPIRE notes, is the fact that the court has tasked the Dominican government — which opposed the constitutional challenge and has repeatedly refused to engage in open dialogue about abortion reform — with updating the legislation to align with the ruling. Advocates question what meaningful progress can be expected from a government that has already made its opposition to abortion liberalization clear.
ASPIRE is a non-governmental advocacy group focused on advancing fair and just reproductive health policy across the Caribbean. The organization frames itself as pro-motherhood and pro-family while supporting expanded access to safe, legal abortion, and works to conduct research and facilitate dialogue between civil society and governments across the region.