OPEN LETTER TO PM FROM FROM ASPIRE

We are appalled at the indifference that your Attorney General’s Chambers has shown to our constitutional challenge to our criminal abortion law.

The reproductive health of poor women and girls is being put at risk while the AG’s Chambers toys with legal procedural niceties.

At least twice (2020 and 2022) your leading legal officer spoke of the need to change the law.

Still, when we wrote to him in 2022 asking for a clarification of the law, we received no reply.

Yet, in 2024, when we approached the High Court, the same authority who voluntarily said the law should be changed, asked the Court to dismiss the challenge because the law had been repealed in 1995.  Amazing.

The High Court ruled in favour of the claimants.  Now, the AG’s Chambers, determined to obstruct, is digging ever deeper into legal precedent, appealing the Court’s ruling and asking for a new judge.

Really?

If the law was indeed repealed in 1995, then abortion is no longer criminal.  Why didn’t the AG simply advise us of this in 2022?  Why not do so now?

Hon. Prime Minister, as primus inter pares, where do you stand?  Are you also aligned with this convoluted commitment to extending hardship on poor women and girls?

Let’s cut to the chase.  If your Cabinet is representative of the people of the state, then there is a reasonable likelihood that about 70% of them have been engaged in arranging at least one abortion with a physician.  Why keep this privilege to yourselves?

Is yours a government of the people or a government of the privileged?

2025 is the 30th anniversary of the liberal abortion law in Guyana.  The abortion rate has fallen by 20%, the unintended pregnancy rate is lower by 28% (Guttmacher Institute), and most important, maternal mortality has plummeted by 41% (World Bank).   Where is our Minister of Health?

Which is a better measure of the sanctity of life, Prime Minister: (i) A criminal law you cannot enforce and a high abortion rate?  Or (ii) liberal, legal abortion and far fewer abortions?  Is form more important than function?

Which is a better indicator of the moral fabric of society, Hon. Prime Minister: (i) Pride in a criminal law that festers such criminal violence that governments must rely on the state violence of States of Emergency as we have in Jamaica and Trinidad? (ii) Or legal abortion that nurtures the lowest crime rate in a decade as President Irfaan Ali recently announced in Guyana?  Is appearance more important than substance?

Why is your AG’s Chambers so determined to prevent us from having our day in Court?

We sincerely hope you will end these wretched shenanigans.

We are pro-choice because we are pro-life.

Sincerely,

ASPIRE