Pro-life advocates got what they wanted when Roe v Wade was overturned. Or did we?
I can’t help but think of that adage, steeped in Christian tradition (Luke 12:48), “From everyone who has been given much, much will be demanded; and from the one who has been entrusted with much, much more will be asked.” Guam’s pro-life community, like many others throughout the nation, are failing their purpose. Or perhaps it’s more simple than that. The pro-life mantra has become so myopically anti-abortion, that now that states (and territories) have the right to restrict abortion, the rabidly anti-abortion have tunneled and insulated themselves from the larger and actual pro-life agenda.
I am a pro-life advocate and have been since I was 16. My advocacy is based on a singular principle: that the non-natural termination of life at any stage of life (except in the defense of yours), is homicide. And (not but), there are practical considerations and responsibilities of the state, whether or not the state decides to restrict access. Being “pro-life” cannot and should not stop at valuing life in the womb. The mother’s life matters, too. The life of that baby once it is born matters. The health of the fetus through gestation matters. The health of the mother matters. Life-flourishing environments of foster care and adoptive families matter. Prescribing antidotes to generational poverty matters.
The pro-life movement in Guam and elsewhere is in its infancy, and it shows.
In Atlanta, two young women died because Georgia law made their reproductive health care both onerous and shame ridden. Every pro-life advocate should be up in arms about their deaths. Their lives mattered just as much as the lives of unborn children. Yet all we hear are crickets from the pro-life movement.
Here in Guam, I have witnessed recently the hop, skip, and a jump the once-reason bearing pro-life committee has made into the land of paranoid and Trumpian politics. And coming from someone who sat around the table of a very small Catholic Pro-Life Committee in 1996, I have to say, what’s become of the movement (part of it, not all of it) is sad.
Earlier this year Tom Fisher and a bipartisan majority of senators introduced a legislative appropriation that would authorize $400,000 to the Bureau of Women’s Affairs for its Guahan Doula Project. The project, with the proper funding, would train and pay doulas to assist pregnant people with pregnancy, child birth, and traversing the first year of motherhood.
Every scientific study I have read about doulas reveals that their care is linked to reduced incidence of caesarian birth, low birth weight, maternal mortality, and infant mortality: all conditions in which Guam tops national rates. All of these issues should matter to pro-lifers.
Here’s the thing about politics. The political arena can turn the most wonderfully motivated people into paranoid conspiracy theorists unwilling to see people who disagree with them as people who may be on the same page on different issues. For instance, just because Tom Fisher is a pro-choice advocate and pro-choice champion Jayne Flores is the director of the BWA, some in the Guam pro-life community will sustain suspicion against anything those two do. And, thus in the minds of the paranoid pro-lifers, because Mr. Fisher introduced the doula funding bill to benefit Ms. Flores’ agency, there must be a subliminal pro-abortion agenda at hand.
That’s precisely what’s happening with the Fisher legislation. The pro-life committee is waging a war against the bill and the senators who support it, including the legislature’s two most prolific pro-life proponents: Chris Duenas and Jesse Lujan. The republican senators are co-sponsors of the Fisher bill because they see what every reasonable person sees about this bill: it’s about saving lives.
“The Doula Bill #318-37 is a bill intended to make abortion access easier and abortion training available,” pro-life committee chairwoman Sharon O’Mallan wrote to senators. “This bill is making it’s (sic) rounds to get on the Legislative Floor for September 2024. I have personally talked to both Republican Senators Jesse Lujan and Christopher Duenas to get their names off the bill. Both claimed that the bill didn’t talk about abortion. I told them that the bill is definitely about making abortion easier.”
Not only does the bill say absolutely nothing about abortion, doulas are not abortion doctors. They can’t perform abortions. The training and funding of a doula does absolutely nothing to change the fact that there are no practicing elective abortion doctors in Guam. There are no elective abortion clinics. There is no nexus from a doula to an abortion, except for doulas who provide comfort and care to women who choose to get an abortion.
Ms. O’Mallan’s email went on to attack at least two doulas, both young women, who also happen to be pro-choice; one of whom made the point in a news story about the lack of reproductive health care available to women in Guam. This is where the rabid pro-life movement loses pro-life advocates like me. It’s ironic that we have to belittle others in order to fight the good fight for life. Don’t get me wrong, I value the work Ms. O’Mallan and the rest of the folks on the pro-life committee do to advocate for anti-abortion legislation and to convince mothers to go through with their pregnancies. But they’re wrong on this front. The energy and resources being used to oppose this life-involving legislation could be better spent on life advocacy from pre-natal care to postpartum assistance.
By the way, where is the Republican Party of Guam in all of this? Two of their senators who happen to be their most pro-life senators are under attack by a de facto extension of their party – the pro-life committee – and all I hear is silence from party leadership.
In fact, the BWA was established by a Republican administration and its female senators. In 1988, Governor Joseph F. Ada issued an executive order creating the bureau. Then, in 1991, Senators Herminia Dierking, Pilar Lujan, and Marilyn Manibusan introduced Bill 116 to formally establish the BWA as a distinct entity within the executive branch of the government of Guam. This bill received unanimous support, leading to Public Law 21-23, signed by Acting Governor Frank F. Blas, which enacted the BWA into law.
The bureau was mandated to champion our famalåo’an population in public policy, advocating for their needs, recognizing their voices and challenges, and increasing their opportunities. Although the BWA was dormant for nearly a decade, Governor Lou Leon Guerrero revitalized it in January 2019 to address pressing social, economic, and cultural issues affecting women and marginalized groups in Guam.
Yet, despite this rich history and the clear intentions of the bill, the pro-life committee has commissioned another Republican, Telo Taitague to rally her “troops” against it. Ms. Taitague, who has been a recurring source of discord within the Republican caucus, seems driven more by personal revenge than by principle.
It should be known that Senator Telo Taitague, who now spearheads the opposition against this legislation, once served as the Director of the Bureau of Women’s Affairs in February 2007 before her election to the 30th Guam Legislature. In a revealing quote from the Guam Daily Post in December 2008, Taitague stated, “When I came in, it was up to me to make this bureau work without money. There was no money for the office or the materials, …no funds to do anything at all.”
Nearly 16 years have passed since she made these statements, and under her watchful eye, the bureau has remained unfunded and inactive. Despite her past proclamations like, “I hope [the next director] will be as passionate as I am with regard to women’s issues and rights, in addressing violence against women, and in providing assistance to those who want to better themselves.” Taitague has been elected to the Guam Legislature three times since, yet she has never initiated any action for the BWA. Her hypocrisy is glaring and her motives clear—her opposition against the bill is less about its merits and more about her own political insecurities and personal vendettas.
What I want to know from the pro-life committee is how it allowed itself to devolve to this point where it is using so many resources to oppose a pro-life measure, and to use a senators so steeped in moral conflict to be its champion?
As a pro-life advocate, I realize I’m in the minority. The majority of our people very clearly value reproductive health freedom, so passing anti-abortion legislation already is an uphill battle. Why engage in this political controversy and risk putting off people life me and others who have not formed a full conviction on the matter of abortion on demand? Because that’s what’s happening. The pro-life committee is turning off supporters.
