Guam’s Grotesque Muddle

If its potential consequences were not so serious, it would be tempting to dismiss the constitutional drama now being played out in Guam as theater of the absurd. However, when the first legal action taken under the island’s restrictive new anti-abortion statute seeks not to halt termination of a pregnancy but to prohibit speech, it is clear that what’s in progress is comedy too dark for laughs.

Guam is a self-governing U.S. territory. Its residents, most of whom profess Roman Catholicism, are American citizens. Earlier this month, Guam’s 21 territorial senators--all but one a Catholic--passed America’s most restrictive anti-abortion legislation shortly after the island’s archbishop threatened anyone who voted against the measure with excommunication. Monday, Guam’s governor signed the bill into law, despite the opinion of his attorney general that the statute is patently unconstitutional. It prohibits termination of any pregnancy unless two doctors declare that the mother’s life is in danger or that her health will be gravely impaired by giving birth. Under the law, anyone who performs an abortion can be prosecuted as a felon; women who undergo abortion face misdemeanor charges, as does anyone who advises or solicits terminating pregnancy.

Tuesday, during a speech to the Guam Press Club, Janet Benshoof, director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s Reproductive Rights Project, advised pregnant women that they could leave the island and obtain abortions in Hawaii. She has been charged with soliciting abortion. If convicted, she may be jailed for one year and fined $1,000.

Cooler heads will sort out the grotesque muddle created on Guam, but not before the right to privacy established in Roe vs. Wade and delicate questions of free speech are put to a burdensome and dangerous test. If there is any value to this distasteful exercise, it is that it reminds us again that a woman’s right to decide her fate in the private sanctuary of her own conscience and the right of any person to speak his or her mind are threads inextricably interwoven in the fabric of individual liberty. Pull one such thread away and the entire fabric frays to rags, leaving us all to shiver in the cold wind of tyranny.