UPDATE: My stars and stripes are showing; turns out the Morgetaler anniversary is on Monday.
Today On Monday, Canadians celebrate the 20th anniversary of the Morgentaler decision, which struck down Canada’s anti-abortion laws and ended the prosecution of Dr. Henry Morgentaler. And there’s a lot to celebrate — including Dr. Morgentaler himself, who is a pretty impressive man.
Morgentaler, a Polish Holocaust survivor who earned his medical training in Germany after being released from Auschwitz, came to Canada after med school graduation (he opposed Zionism and turned down a chance to live in Israel). He worked as a general practitioner in Canada, and began to see the damage illegal abortion did to women — and so he advocated for changing the laws, and began performing illegal abortions himself. Morgentaler eventually opened Canada’s first abortion clinic. He was arrested in 1970, tried, but acquitted by a jury. The acquittal was overturned, so he appealed, and was acquitted again. He was tried again in 1983, and this time the case went up to Canada’s Supreme Court. The Court held that the law under which Morgentaler was convicted was unconstitutional, ending most statutory restrictions on abortion in Canada.
Morgentaler was the victim of anti-choice terrorism in 1992, when his Toronto clinic was bombed. He wasn’t hurt. He won another Supreme Court case in 1993, this one about abortion regulations in the provinces. And he is currently working on opening two abortion clinics in the Canadian Arctic, in order to increase access to abortion services for women who live there. The slogan of his Ontario clinic is “Every Mother a Willing Mother, Every Child a Wanted Child.”
But, just as is the case with their neighbors to the south, Canada is in less-than-perfect shape when it comes to abortion rights. Their problems, though, are different from ours, as is their justification for abortion rights. Just check out what their Supreme Court said about abortion:
As the late Madam Justice Bertha Wilson wrote in the judgment, a woman has a right to continue or terminate a pregnancy, free of state interference.
No law is necessary because no law can do justice to this deeply personal decision.
“It is not just a medical decision,” Judge Wilson wrote. “It is a profound social and ethical one as well. It asserts that a woman’s capacity to reproduce is to be subject not to her control, but to that of the state.”
It’s like a pro-choice dream.
Canada also has a significantly lower abortion rate than the United States. Abortion access, however, remains a problem. Canadian columnist Andre Picard writes:
While the highest court ruled that the state has no place in the uteruses of the nation, the state does have a role in the provision of medically necessary health services, of which abortion is one.
Yet our health system – from the politicians who oversee it to the policy makers and administrators through to the physicians and nurses who should provide non-judgmental care in public institutions – has largely failed women who seek abortions.
The failings are many and varied, but revolve principally around lack of access to timely care.
In short, the arbitrary rules that have crept into the system in the past two decades make a mockery of the Supreme Court ruling.
In Canada, fewer than one in five hospitals perform abortions. One province, Prince Edward Island, offers no abortion services at all. Another, New Brunswick, has created unjustified (and likely unconstitutional) barriers to access, requiring referrals from two doctors.
In the nation’s capital, Ottawa, the wait time for an abortion stretches to six weeks, a perversity. (If there is one area of care for which there should be a wait-time guarantee, it is abortion, obviously a time-sensitive procedure.)
But the greatest injustice is that faced by Canadian women living outside major metropolitan centres, particularly those in the North.
Virtually every hospital and clinic offering abortion services in Canada is located within 150 kilometres of the U.S. border, and there is not a single abortion provider north of the Trans-Canada Highway in Ontario.
A woman in northern Manitoba, for example, needs to travel about 20 hours to access the nearest in-province abortion provider. For women in the three territories, travel can be an insurmountable obstacle.
Abortion should be covered by medicare but, in reality, it is expensive. If a woman opts for an abortion in a private clinic – something that is often necessary given the lack of service offered in hospitals – she must pay out of pocket and be reimbursed. (This policy was recently struck down by the courts in Quebec, which deemed that medicare should foot the bill, regardless of where the procedure is done.)
Worse yet, if a woman travels out of province or to the United States – which, again, many women are forced to do because of lack of timely access domestically – she will not be reimbursed at all.
Further, Canadian women wanting to terminate a pregnancy have no option other than surgical abortion.
Drug-induced abortion – the method of choice of about one-third of women in Europe and the United States – is not even available in Canada. Mifepristone (brand name Mifeprex, also known as RU-486) is a safe, proven alternative, and its lack of availability in Canada is a scandal.
Canada is very progressive in many ways, but, like most countries, it still has a long way to go when it comes to abortion rights. To all the Canadians out there, I wish you a very happy anniversary — and best of luck in making next year even better.
Any Canadians blogging for choice today?
Thanks to Carly for the link.
Jill, you might go here: http://breadnroses.ca/birthpangs/
It’s a start for Canadian blogging for choice.
[...] affirming a woman’s right to choose to have an abortion. As usual, Jill at Feministe has the whole story more eloquently and comprehensively than I could do. Posted by Sam on Saturday, January 26, 2008, [...]
To nitpick, some abortions actually became legal in Canada in 1969 – they had to be performed in designated hospitals, and had to be approved by three-person boards of doctors in those hospitals, who were only allowed to grant approval where the life or health of the woman were at risk. Of course those terms weren’t defined too concretely, so the approval procedures were applied very inconsistently across hospitals.
Morgentaler reversed these limitations, allowing for private clinics and refuting the three-doctor approval problem. It definitely is the point where abortion became a practical option for most Canadians. 1988 seems absurdly late for such a change, but there it is.
Thank you for bringing up the logistical problems many Canadians face – we tend to think of ourselves as an unequivocally pro-choice nation, which gives some Canadians an undue sense of superiority over, let’s say, other nations with more restrictive attitudes towards reproductive choice.
ps: For those who aren’t familiar with Canadian geography, the trans-Canada highway is *not* very far North into Ontario.
pps: Morgentaler was actually decided on January 28, 1988, so the birthday is Monday. But we still dig the discussion.
How does Canada not have mifepristone yet? If we (still) have it in spite of the kicking and screaming and attempts to sabotage its approval from start to right now, how on earth can Canadians not be allowed to use it?
Great post, Jill, and thanks so much.
Monday, the 28th, is the Morgentaler anniversary I’m aiming for, although some of us have been talking here about an International Choice Week, the week between your Roe v. Wade commemorations and our Morgentaler celebrations.
We’re all still facing serious challenges. Even on the left, whenever we raise the banner of choice in Canada, we suddenly find ourselves talking once again to all those young bright men who think there is a debate to be had, and for sure, they want to join in. Abstract debate: such fun!
Many of us feel that we have lost ground over the last generation or so. We defeated bad law here, but we still haven’t been able to put public health support for women into effect across the country, and the propaganda attacks against the Supreme Court’s decisions follow a pattern that I’m sure American readers will recognize.
What can we all do except keep talking and keep fighting? And keep supporting each other? Thanks so much for this post, Jill.
The Trans Canada Highway may not look very far north in Ontario, but keep in mind the following:
Ontario is Huge. and
The vast majority of the population lives in the southern corner.
I suspect that this access problem mirrors the access problem for all health related services. We’re just a really big country with a lot of sparsely populated area and that presents a serious logistical problem.
I live in Ottawa. We have anti-Choice posters everywhere here, including the numerous “pregnancy crisis centres” (which are the same as in the US, unfortunately) signs in nearly every public bus. Walking in downtown in the summer, I’ve seen more than a few shrieking women with “abortion is murder” signs. No men, though…
I think the most dangerous part of all of this is that most people have no idea that abortions are hard to get. We take it for granted that it will be there if we need it. “That’s only in the US” is the common response if someone brings up the difficulty of actually getting one.
I must agree with Rivikah (poster 6) about access – Australia has similar problems in isolated areas. It’s not just access to abortion, it’s access to X-Rays, MRI, chemotherapy, dentists, any doctors at all… I would be interested to see where the access problem is due to laws (like New Brunswick) and where it’s a lack of any medical services.
A quick and very important correction:
Drug-induced abortion is legal and available in Canada.
Although mifepriston (RU-486) is not available in Canada, non-surgical, drug- induced abortions can be preformed through the administration of methotrexate and misoprostol in combination. These drugs are approved as treatment for some non-abortion condition (I don’t know what exactly), and so doctors are legally able to use it for other purposes, including abortion. Many of the Morgentaler Clinics provide this treatment. This treatment is available, however, only for early stage abortions, generally up to 7 weeks.
Also, although it is true that abortion providers are almost entirely located within 150 miles of the Canada/US border, so is the vast majority of the Canadian population. Obviously, this does not mean that Canadian women living in northern and/or rural areas do not face incredible barriers to abortion, but the statistic without the geographic/population context makes it seem much more extreme than it is.
Yes, we’re saving up for Monday, January 28. Twenty years of lawlessness! I am proud to live in a country with NO law on women’s reproductive rights.
There are problems, of course. We live under patriarchy. And we have the religious wingnuts here too.
Keep up the fight there in the US. Victories by your wingnuts encourage ours.
update to my previous post:
From the Morgentaler Clinic website:
Methotrexate is a drug used to treat psoriasis, and cancer.
Misoprostol is a drug used to treat stomach ulcers.
Morgentaler got an honorary degree from my university, which cause a big hubbub. I would have liked to hear his commencement speech.
Having done some research on just the very topic of Ontario geography recently, as it’s home and all, you know what’s north of the Trans-Canada in Ontario? Lots of tiny communities that don’t really have addresses; they have map designations off the Canadian Lands Survey Register. That’s a whole lot of You Can’t Get There From Here. (Those communities do generally have roads. They run the length of the town and then stop.) Unless you folks have discovered how to fold space I don’t know how you’d make many of these places objectively or subjectively closer to everyone else. You can’t build road or rail too effectively through lake-dotted muskeg, and bush pilots tend to be pricey.
One thing we could do to make abortions more accessible for women in the far north (and let’s not get into the First Nations politics aspect here, ok) is reregulate medical school tuitions provincially and subsidise doctors to go practice in the north, much the same way as the province used to (and maybe still does) with teachers.
I’d really also like to see some pro-abortion ads around, instead of just the anti-abortion ads. As in, “In Canada, abortion is legal and available. If you are considering abortion, call…” Any Canucks on this thread want to bug CARAL about doing it?
Thanks for the post Jill! I read a really good report put out last year on access to abortion in Canada, I’ll see if I can dredge up the link.
Meanwhile, here’s a link to a great article by Torontoist who expose an ad which features a little known victim of abortion: http://torontoist.com/2008/01/abortion_makes.php
Access to medical care in remote regions (and with few exceptions, anything farther than 150 miles from the US border is remote) is a problem across the board. Women in many Northern communities have to be airlifted out for childbirth. So yes, there are abortion access problems, but as people have mentioned, these are not unique to abortion.
My abortion was quickly available, didn’t involve any hoops, and was taxpayer-funded. The only small snag was that the woman who came to drive me home accidentally ended up at the crisis-pregnancy-centre next door.
And here I was thinking that Canada is so much better for women who need an abortion. I’m so discouraged. I thought by now, womens rights would be farther ahead. Instead, it’s like the clock is running backwards.
[...] wrote about this on Saturday, but today is the 20th anniversary of Canada’s biggest abortion-related Supreme Court case. [...]