(Bloomberg) -- UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson didn’t wait for President Joe Biden to react after the US Supreme Court overturned the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision and erased the constitutional right of women in America to have an abortion. Neither did Canada’s Justin Trudeau. Both abandoned diplomatic niceties to express their dismay. 

French President Emmanuel Macron was not far behind.

All four are due in the Bavarian Alps this weekend for a Group of Seven summit, where the key focus is what to do about Russia four months after its invasion of Ukraine. But the political bombshell that just dropped in the US immediately struck a chord beyond American borders. 

The UK prime minister, shackled with his own problems back home, was quick to comment. “I’ve got to tell you, I think it’s a big step backwards,” he said at a news conference during a visit to Rwanda. It’s unusual for any British leader to speak critically of the US, given how highly the UK prizes its “special relationship,” particularly to wade into domestic matters.

Johnson is the first Catholic prime minister of the UK following his conversion last year. He said the US ruling “has massive impacts on people’s thinking around the world.”

Biden, a church-going Catholic, agreed a few hours later by saying the US now finds itself “an outlier.” It’s an uncomfortable position for the president to be in when heading into an international gathering, at a critical time, with some of the leading democracies and most developed nations. 

The US essentially would now stand among its G-7 cohorts as a nation with some of the most stringent restrictions on the reproductive rights of women. Abortion was legalized in mostly-Catholic Italy in 1978.

The next to comment was the recently re-elected Macron, representing a nation where the separation of church and state has been sacrosanct since the French Revolution. His tweet, translated into English, was unequivocal: “Abortion is a fundamental right for all women. We must protect it.”

The ruling came on the same day the lower house of Germany’s parliament moved to abolish a law that banned doctors from providing information about abortions. 

So far the G-7 host, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, has stayed quiet on the US ruling. But it will no doubt be something that he and other leaders at the summit will be asked about. 

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