Across the Caribbean, abortion touches nearly every household. Statistics underscore this stark reality: roughly 70 percent of all Caribbean women will undergo an abortion by the time they reach 44, and a comparable share of men are directly involved in these pregnancy outcomes. Over a 30-year period, this means almost every family in the region will have a direct or indirect connection to abortion. For this reason, the ongoing constitutional challenge to Dominica’s outdated abortion law is not a niche issue reserved for lawyers, activist groups or religious institutions — it is a matter that concerns every member of society.
That is why local reproductive rights advocacy group ASPIRE, a pro-choice organization registered in Dominica and five other Caribbean nations that works to advance equitable reproductive health policy, launched a constitutional challenge against the country’s existing abortion law, which dates back to the 1860s. Under the existing law, abortion was only permitted to save the life of the pregnant person, with all other cases strictly criminalized. For decades, this harsh regime has proven both ineffective and harmful: abortions have remained widely accessible, but only in unregulated, clandestine conditions, with many people forced to travel abroad to access care to avoid legal penalty.
ASPIRE’s challenge compared the 160-year-old law to the standards set by Dominica’s 1978 Constitution, arguing that the restrictive statute violated five core constitutionally enshrined rights. In its final ruling, the court sided with ASPIRE on two of the five claims, marking a small but significant legal win for reproductive justice advocates.
First, the court agreed that the law violates Section 13 of the Constitution, which prohibits discrimination based on sex and other personal characteristics. Because the abortion statute exclusively regulates a medical procedure that only impacts pregnant women, the court found it ran counter to the constitution’s guarantee of legal equality and non-discrimination. Second, the court upheld ASPIRE’s claim under Section 1(a), which guarantees the right to protection under the law. The group argued that criminalizing abortion stripped pregnant people of legal protection for their healthcare decisions, and instead immunized the government from its failure to provide safe, regulated abortion care. The court concurred, finding the law violated the constitutional guarantees of personal liberty, security and equal protection of the law.
However, the court rejected the three remaining claims put forward by ASPIRE. On the right to privacy guaranteed under Section 1(c), the group argued that restricting bodily autonomy via abortion bans constitutes an unconstitutional overreach into personal private life. The court ruled that Dominica’s constitutional right to privacy only applies to one’s home and personal property, not individual bodily autonomy, so the claim could not stand. On the ban of inhuman and degrading treatment outlined in Section 5, ASPIRE argued that forcing people to carry pregnancies to term against their will — especially in cases of rape, incest, or lethal fetal anomaly — causes severe psychological and physical suffering that meets the standard for cruel, inhuman treatment. The court rejected this finding, ruling that these circumstances do not rise to the level of a constitutional violation. Finally, on the right to freedom of conscience protected in Section 1(b), ASPIRE contended that criminalizing abortion forces people to continue pregnancies that contradict their personal moral and ethical beliefs. The court declined to intervene in what it framed as a conflict of competing moral beliefs, leaving this claim unaddressed.
In its final ruling, the court confirmed that the overly restrictive provisions of the existing abortion law are unconstitutional, and formally called on the Dominican government to update the statute to add new legal exceptions for abortion in cases of rape, incest, and severe fetal anomaly. While the ruling is legally valid, ASPIRE emphasizes that it falls far short of addressing the country’s public health crisis around unsafe abortion. The group estimates that even with the proposed new exceptions, only 8 percent of all abortions performed in Dominica would become legal, leaving the remaining 92 percent still forced underground in unregulated, unsafe conditions.