TEEN VOGUE FEATURE: There Are No Abortion Providers In Guam. We Must Change That.
In 2019, when news broke that a 12 year-old girl in my island community on Guam was raped and impregnated, reality set in for me and many women and girls. It was the first time some of us realized that we did not have any abortion providers in Guam, and it would take extraordinary measures for someone from our island to get an abortion. She would have to fly thousands of miles to Hawai‘i — and because she comes from a poor family who does not have the financial means to pursue abortion services elsewhere, she would not be able to end the pregnancy.
It was a wakeup call.
There is a direct line from that moment to the moment this year when my friends and I founded Famalao’an Rights, a reproductive justice initiative in Guam working to ensure everyone can get the reproductive healthcare they need — and have their choice to do so respected — in our island community. Famalao’an means “women” in CHamoru, the native language of the Indigenous CHamoru people of the Marianas Islands, of which Guam is the largest.
Our work is to challenge the status quo and continue to actively advocate for accessible and comprehensive reproductive health care in Guam. But since the ACLU joined advocates from Guam to file a lawsuit challenging two abortion restrictions on the island, this fight to grow our base and shift the culture has taken on new urgency. Suddenly, we are on the edge of the biggest change to abortion laws in Guam since our foremothers helped defeat a full abortion ban in 1990. Already, the ACLU lawsuit has resulted in a partial settlement that will clear the way to restore access to abortion in Guam. But there is still work to be done to ensure that everyone on our island can get the care they need with dignity and respect, and without medically unnecessary obstacles. Yet, few people in the continental U.S. are aware of this.
If you care about abortion access and reproductive justice in the United States — especially for people of color and Indigenous people — you must care about Guam.
As a small island in the Pacific, Guam has endured centuries of colonization by Spain, Japan, and the U.S. Today, we are an unincorporated U.S. territory — a status that means we have no vote in Congress or in the electoral college but are still subject to some parts of the U.S. Constitution. This includes being guaranteed the right to abortion.
As in states across the U.S., anti-abortion politicians are working to prevent us from exercising that right. The motivation might be different (for legislators in Guam, the Catholic Church’s influence is strong) but the goal is the same: to prevent us from making decisions about our own bodies and our lives.
Women of color are leading the resistance to anti-abortion politics on Guam, just as they are in the U.S. Our people have waged this fight for decades — pioneers like our Maga'håga and current Governor Lou Leon Guerrero; and Attorney Anita Arriola, who brought a lawsuit (also with the ACLU) in 1990 to end the abortion ban.
These women inspire me. They are both CHamoru and deeply rooted in our community. They both had a Catholic upbringing and education, but still recognized and valued women’s bodily autonomy. They fought profound stigma, the power of the Catholic church, and pressure to silence their support for reproductive health. They won that essential fight in the 90s, and now, we are picking up where they left off.
