As Antigua and Barbuda’s High Court prepares to deliver a landmark ruling on a constitutional challenge to the nation’s restrictive abortion law by the end of 2025, regional reproductive rights advocates are turning to a recent parallel judgment from Dominica for critical insight into what may lie ahead.
Advocacy group ASPIRE, which brought both challenges, notes that abortion access is already a widespread reality across the Caribbean despite outdated restrictive legislation. Statistics paint a stark picture: roughly 70% of all Caribbean women will have undergone an abortion by the age of 44. With men equally involved in these outcomes, nearly every household across the region has been touched by abortion over a 30-year period. This reality leaves thousands of people effectively classified as unapprehended criminals in every community, even as many publicly oppose reform of the law.
In Antigua and Barbuda, abortion has long been legally permitted only to save the life of the pregnant person, a narrow restriction that has proven both ineffective at reducing abortion rates and harmful to public health. The current constitutional challenge seeks to expand the legal grounds for abortion beyond this single limited exception, just as advocates did in Dominica. In that case, legal teams compared Dominica’s 1860s-era abortion ban against the nation’s 1978 constitution, arguing that the outdated law violated fundamental rights enshrined in the modern governing document. Since the constitutional protections for rights in Antigua and Barbuda are nearly identical to those in Dominica, the outcome of that case offers valuable guidance for the upcoming local ruling.
In the Dominica case, advocates argued that the restrictive abortion law violated five distinct constitutional rights, and the court sided with them on two of those claims. First, the court ruled that the abortion law violated Section 13 of Dominica’s constitution (equivalent to Section 14 in Antigua and Barbuda’s constitution), which prohibits discrimination on the basis of sex and other protected traits. The court agreed that a law that exclusively regulates the bodily autonomy of pregnant people constitutes unlawful gender discrimination. Second, the court upheld the claim that the ban violated Section 1(a) of Dominica’s constitution (Section 15 in Antigua and Barbuda), which guarantees the right to liberty, security, and equal protection under the law. The court accepted that criminalizing abortion denies pregnant people this protection, while shielding the government from accountability for failing to provide safe abortion care.
However, the court rejected the remaining three claims put forward by advocates. It threw out the privacy-rights claim, noting that Dominica’s constitution limits the right to privacy to one’s home and property, not individual bodily autonomy. It also rejected the argument that forcing continued pregnancy in cases of rape, incest, or non-viable fetal development qualifies as cruel and inhuman treatment, violating the constitutional ban on such practices. Finally, the court declined to rule on the freedom of conscience claim, which argued that criminalizing abortion forces pregnant people to carry pregnancies against their core personal beliefs, choosing not to intervene in the space of competing ethical views.
In its final ruling, the Dominica High Court declared that the overly restrictive provisions of the existing criminal abortion law were unconstitutional, and formally called on the Dominican government to introduce new legal exceptions for abortion in cases of rape, incest, and severe fetal anomaly. Notably, ASPIRE points out that the text of Antigua and Barbuda’s privacy clause – Section 3 – differs from Dominica’s, explicitly protecting personal privacy and family life, a difference that could lead to a different outcome on that claim in the upcoming local ruling.
While ASPIRE characterizes the Dominica ruling as a solid, thorough legal outcome, the group emphasizes that it falls far short of addressing the region’s high rate of unregulated clandestine abortion. Ultimately, widespread reform of abortion law falls to elected legislatures, not the courts, the group notes. Even with the new exceptions mandated by the Dominica ruling, it is estimated that only 8% of all abortions performed in the country will become legal, leaving 92% of procedures still performed underground, outside of formal health regulation and safety protections. As Antigua and Barbuda awaits its own court decision, the Dominica outcome offers both a roadmap of possible wins and a reminder of how far the region must go to align abortion law with the reality of reproductive life across the Caribbean.