5,000 Abortions Plus
If abortion is outlawed in the United States…
women will be able to go north for the procedure.
Although Dr. Henry Morgentaler
was a Canadian abortionist, many of
his women patients came from the United States.
The ability
of women to travel to another country shows the futility of abortion laws. In
Ireland today, where abortion is illegal although up for referendum, women take
one of the low-cost airlines, often returning the same day to be home in time
for dinner. (note: abortion is now legal up to 12 weeks but it wasn't when this was written)
If
abortion is made illegal in the United States, abortions won’t stop. Women who
can afford it will travel to where they are possible. Women who can’t afford it
or are not near the Canadian or Mexican border will go to whomever will do it
or resort to poisons, coat hangers or knitting needles, regardless of safety.
Why would anyone expect it to be any different from the years before Roe v. Wade?
What It Was Like
We sat in Dr. Henry’s Morgentaler’s waiting room in February 1970. Several of the other women
who had been with us on the flight from Boston sat there too, either waiting
for an abortion or supporting a friend about to have an abortion.
I am sure
they had been given the same instructions as we had been given on what to do
and how to get there.
Tell customs you are
in Canada for a
day of shopping
Take a cab or bus to a shopping center
Walk from there to the doctor’s
office
After the
procedure we had hours to wait for our flight back; we decided to see a movie.
The closest theater was playing
The Damned, a poor choice under the circumstances, but we went anyway.
The same women from the doctor’s office
were on the plane back to
Boston. We assumed they had been sent by a minister
or rabbi from the Clergy
Counseling Service (CCS),
who arranged for women to have safe medical procedures rather
than submit to dangerous backroom abortions. In preparing this chapter,
when I looked at the late Dr. Morgentaler on various Youtube interviews, I would not have recognized him, which isn’t important. February
1970 was nearly five decades ago.
What is
important, I have his words and
answers to the questions I would
have asked him if I could, to try to convince pro-life advocates that nothing,
nothing, nothing will stop a woman who wants an abortion from getting one.
I wish the
same energies were spent on making sure
everyone had birth control and better programs for mothers who decide not to abort.
That might sway some women to keep their babies. France, for example, has excellent
and affordable child care from infancy and
generous pre-birth and after-birth leave time. In many countries mothers are given allowances for each child, making
the decision to keep a child less of an economic one. When maternity
leaves can vary from several months to a couple of years,
motherhood is not as difficult.
And what if every
person working to stop abortion
gave one baby a loving
home? Henry (Heniek) Morgentaler didn’t deal with the what ifs but the
what nows.
Dr. Morgentaler was born 19
March 1923 in Lodz, Poland to Golda and Josef Morgentaler. His father, who
would be killed by the Nazi Gestapo, served as a City Councilor and on the
Jewish Labour Bund before the war.
As a
school child Dr. Morgentaler experienced prejudice. He was attacked often by
anti-Jewish children who threw stones at him on his way to school.
Lodz was
the third largest city in Poland. The Germans, after their 1939 invasion,
herded the Jewish population into a ghetto.
Morgentaler lived there with his mother and brother Abraham from 1941 to 1944. His mother was
sent to Auschwitz on 23 August 1944 where she died. Four days later he and his
brother were transported to Dachau. The number tattooed on his arm was 95077.
He also spent time in Auschwitz.
After the War
By the time the U.S. Army liberated him on 29 April 1945, Morgentaler weighed
70 pounds. When he was strong enough after a stay in
the Lansberg/Lens Displaced Persons Hospital, he and his brother were
transferred to a Bavarian Displaced Hospital Camp.
His
brother migrated to the United States 23 July 1946, but Morgentaler remained at
the camp until late November.
He became
an illegal immigrant
(although the term was not used as it is today) in Brussels
with his fiancée and childhood sweetheart, Chava Rosenfarb (1923-2011), whom he
married in 1949. She was a Bergen-Belsen survivor and became a well-known
Jewish-Canadian poet and author.
The conditions in Belgium
were severe both with the weather and economically.
The couple had a daughter Goldie after emigrating to Canada in 1950.
He went to medical
school at the Université de Montreal, graduating in 1953.
During his studies, Chava became pregnant. The couple decided
on an abortion, something
Morgentaler described as “sordid” and he stated he regretted it. When he was
being interviewed by Adrienne Clarkson, she jumped on the “regrets” but he made
it clear the regrets were for the necessity and the conditions.
The couple had a son later,
Abraham. They divorced in 1975.
Pro-choice
and pro-choice groups often promote the idea that after an abortion a woman
either feels nothing but relief while anti-choice
groups will say she will be
stricken with remorse. This is too much of a generalization and simplification. It is possible
to be both relieved and regretful at the same time or
have variations of many feelings at different times through life. It is not one
size of emotion fits all.
Activism for The Rest of His Life
Morgentaler began his professional life in Montreal, where he was one of the first doctors to give
vasectomies, provide IUDs and other birth control information.
He told a Government of Canada committee
on 19 October 1967 that women had the right to a safe abortion. The result was
that women began calling him for abortions. At first, he told them, “I
sympathize with you…but the law won't let me help you.” He was aware he could
be jailed, lose his practice, his life as he knew it. The best he could do was refer them to a doctor who
could help.
The next year in August the Criminal Code section 251 legalized abortion
if: performed in a
hospital or approved by a Therapeutic Abortion
Committee The problems with this change were:
Only about a third
of hospitals had such committees
Some committees never met
The committees were usually made up only of
men
Some never saw the woman
There was no appeal process
In 1968,
Morgentaler decided to help the women who were calling him. He closed his
family practice, which was serving a working-class patient community.
Morgentaler
opened his first abortion clinic in Montreal in 1969. By 1973 he claimed to
have conducted 5,000 safe abortions despite interruptions.
Police raided the clinic in June 1970.
He was
arrested, tried and acquitted, but the Quebec Court of Appeals overturned the
verdict. Morgentaler began
an 18-month sentence
in March 1975. He only served 10 months. The law was later changed so such a
verdict could not be overturned.
The
Disciplinary Committee of the Professional Corporation of Physicians of Quebec
suspended his medical license for a year because of his conviction.
When the Parti Québécois came
to power in 1976 they decided abortion
laws could not be
enforced if juries failed to convict. The same year the Attorney
General for Quebec
stated abortions performed by
doctors in clinics were legal in the province.
People saw
Morgentaler as a devil or saint depending on which side of the abortion issue
they were on.
How did he see himself?
Not a scapegoat, he told Adrienne
Clarkson in a 20 June 1977 interview. A martyr? To be a martyr when he wanted to continue to
work and live was also rejected by him.
He saw the
battle to bring women the freedom of choice as part of a battle between good
and evil. His opponents saw it as evil, but he saw it as good.
Morgentaler
was not a perfect man. He ran into questions about his procedures and tax
problems. Said to be a womanizer, he married four times.
Clarkson asked him about his reaction
to prison. He said much of it was interesting because of the individuals he met with stories to tell. He
minimized the discomfort of his time in solitary confinement, but he had a
heart attack while there.
He compared
prison to a concentration camp;
prison was better.
Clarkson asked him what
he thought about the rumors
that he had not been in a concentration camp. His concentration camp experience is tattooed on this arm.
Morgentaler
was not alone in his crusade. CARAL, the Canadian Association for Repeal of the Abortion Law, supported his challenge to the 1969 law that required a Therapeutic Abortion Committee approval prior to an
abortion being granted. They were formed in 1974 and helped raised money for
his legal fees.
The
organization was replaced in 2005 by the Abortion Rights Coalition of Canada
and Action Canada for Sexual Health
and Rights. Canada
is showing no sign of outlawing abortion. If abortion is outlawed in the United States, thousands and
thousands of women will be able to go north for the procedure.
Morgentaler developed
the vacuum curettage method of abortion.
It is safer and easier than
the dilation and curettage (D&C) women receive after a miscarriage or other
gynecological problems.
After
Quebec stopped prosecuting him in 1976, Morgentaler began opening abortion
clinics all over Canada including (although they were still illegal) in:
Montréal
Québec
Toronto
Ontario
Fredericton
New Brunswick
He and his
colleagues were charged with providing illegal miscarriages after Toronto
police raided his clinic.
Where was
public opinion at that point? Some 72% of Canadians believed abortion was not
up to the state but between the woman and her doctor.
The court cases continued. In R v. Morgentaler, the Canadian Supreme
Court said the 1969
abortion law violated Charter of Rights and Freedoms and infringed upon a woman's
right to “life, liberty and security of person.”
Chief Justice Brian Dickson wrote: “Forcing a woman, by
threat of criminal sanction, to carry a fetus
to term unless
she meets certain
criteria unrelated to her own priorities and aspirations,
is a
profound interference with a woman's
body and thus a violation
of her security of the person.”
Justice
Bertha Wilson wrote: “The decision of a woman to terminate her pregnancy falls
within the class of protected decisions [because it will have] profound
psychological, economic and social consequences for the pregnant woman… The
right to reproduce or not to reproduce… is properly perceived as an integral
part of modern woman’s struggle to assert her dignity and worth as a human
being… The purpose of [section 251] is to take the decision away from the woman
and give it to a committee.”
Morgentaler called the day of the decision
“the happiest of my life.”
Abortion
was once again under threat when Progressive Minister Brian Mulroney tried to
recriminalize abortion in 1990. It passed the House of Commons 140 to 131.
Within two weeks two women died of illegal abortions, one in a back alley, one
self-induced. It was a reminder of the bad old days when an estimated 4,000 to 6,000
Canadian women died annually from illegal or self-induced abortions. Fortunately,
the legislation died in the Senate.
Morgentaler saw other ups and
downs. He would be in
and out of court. Some included:
Abortions would be covered in the Ontario
Health Insurance Plan, 1993
Law changed to allow Morgentaler to open abortion
clinics, 1994
New Brunswick banned clinic abortions. He opened a clinic anyway. The
New Brunswick Court of Queen’s Bench took away his license to practice, 1994
Abortions approved under the Canada Health Act. Federal rulings make
Nova Scotia and New Brunswick permit clinical abortions, 1995
Morgentaler wrote The
Moral Case for Abortion, 1996.
Morgentaler challenged PEI’s regulation denying
the payment under
the province’s health care
plan. The government won that round, 1997
He never
stopped fighting. He wrote Ann McLellan in 2002, Federal Minister of Health,
asking her to fund abortion clinics in Québec, New Brunswick, Manitoba and
Prince Edward Island. He and Claude Paquin,
founding members for Access to
Abortion, asked the Government of Québec to reimburse women
who paid for their abortion. It totaled millions.
In 2003 he
sued News Brunswick for not funding clinics, coming up against Justice Minister
Brad Green.
Morgentaler’s
health forced him to stop performing abortions in 2006. He continued to oversee
the operation of his clinics.
Threats and Attacks
Besides legal threats and
regular raids, violence marred Morgentaler’s life. He was said to have received
death threats that when they were piled up were over six inches thick. He was attacked with garden shears
in Toronto in 1983 by Augusto Dantas.
A fire
bomb severely damaged his clinic in Toronto. Morgentaler supporters came to the
clinic with “Just Say No to Bombs” signs. Abortions were transferred to one of
the other four Toronto clinics.
The
Canadian Security Intelligence Service has said that anti-abortion violence is
single-issue terrorism.
Honors and Awards
Morgentaler received many
awards and honors for his work, but some were met with objections by pro-life
people in the form of petitions and demonstrations. Recognitions include:
Humanist Association. Dr. Henry Morgentaler was the first president of
the Humanist Association of Canada (HAC) from 1968 to 1999. He remained the
organization's honorary president. In 1975 he and Betty Friedan (Feminist Mystique) shared the Humanist
of the Year award.
The University of Western
Ontario gave him an honorary
Doctor of Laws degree.
Couching Award for Public Policy Leadership, 2005, for his work for
women’s rights and reproductive health.
Canadian Labour Congress
Award for Outstanding Service to Humanity,
2008.
Member of the Order of Canada / Ordre du Canada, 2008, for “…his
commitment to increased health
options for women,
his determined efforts
to influence Canadian public policy and his leadership
in humanist and civil liberties organizations.”
Nominated for a Transformational Canadians award in 2010. The award
goes to a person who has “made a difference by immeasurably improving the lives of others.”
When Morgentaler received the Canadian Labour
Congress recognition, he said, “We must
remain vigilant in defense of a woman's right to choose, because there are
still too many legislators and health care providers out there who are not pro-choice and too many women who continue to have their health put at
risk because they are denied access to safe abortion services in a supportive
environment—20 years after Canada’s abortion laws were struck down.”
He died 29 May 2013 at the age of 90.
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