According to RNZ, Guam’s Supreme Court has held that a 1990 U.S. territory’s law protecting all preborn children from abortion is a “dead law” because legislation that was approved years later has essentially done away with it.
Public Law 20-134 from 1990 states that “every human being begins at conception, and that unborn children have protect[able] interests in life, health, and well-being. The purpose of this Act is to protect the unborn children of Guam.”
WARNING: Images of abortion victims below.
However, under more current Guam law, preborn children are only protected from abortion after 13 weeks despite the fact that nothing has changed regarding the science of human prenatal development. An injunction had been placed on Public Law 20-134 to allow abortion to be legal in Guam, and since the overturning of Roe v. Wade in June 2022, pro-lifers in Guam had hoped to lift that injunction and allow the protection for all preborn children in the territory. Instead, the Supreme Court held the injunction and invalidated the old law.
Preborn children, even in the first trimester, have recognizable body parts, even when they are torn apart by a suction aspiration abortion, as seen below:
An aborted fetus’s leg with thigh bone protruding. 8 weeks gestation. Photo courtesy of prolifesociety.com and imagesofabortion.com.
The hand and arm of aborted baby—7 weeks. (Photo courtesty of prolifesociety.com and imagesofabortion.com.)
Chief Justice Philip Carbullido ruled that Public Law 20-134 was void because Roe was the law of the land when Public Law 20-134 was passed in 1990 and therefore, the Guam legislators at the time had overreached when they decided to completely prohibit abortion in the territory.
“We knew this was a dead law due to subsequent laws that were passed that over-rode that law,” said Guam’s Bureau of Women’s Affairs director Jayne Flores. She continued, “It’s dead law now, there’s no possibility of it being resurrected.”
In 2022, pro-life legislators in Guam attempted to pass the Guam Heartbeat Act to protect children from abortion once their heartbeat is detectable. Though the act did pass, the pro-abortion Governor Lou Leon Guerrerro vetoed it.
There are currently no abortionists in Guam following the retirement of the sole abortionist in 2018. Though abortionists in Hawaii who practice telemedicine abortions are willing to send women the abortion pill, Guam law states that women must see the doctor in person to take the abortion drugs, meaning that children in Guam who are at risk of being aborted will likely be spared, unless their mother can get to Hawaii, which is nearly 4,000 miles away.
