Writing in the campus student newspaper ‘The McGill Tribune’ this week, labour and pro-abortion activist Indu Vashist offers a revisionist view of the history of abortion in Canada, arguing the country has had a strong, pro-choice legacy pre-dating Confederation. Linking traditional opposition to abortion to racism, Vashist documents the history of the Canadian abortion debate:
“In Canada prior to Confederation, the majority of recorded recipients of abortions and practitioners were upper class white women. Abortion was criminalized in 1869, in the same era as immigration restriction and forced sterilization of Indigenous women. All of these policies were part of prime minister John A. Macdonald’s declared vision of Canada as ‘a white man’s country’. It wasn’t about morals or rights; it was about the power to control the population. Resistance began immediately. In 1879, the Crown indicted Dr. Emily Stowe for distributing abortifacients. In 1936, social worker Dorothea Palmer was arrested and charged for offering birth control information. In 1968, after practicing family medicine for twenty years in the east end of Montreal, Henry Morgentaler saw a real and tangible need for safe abortions, and began to offer them. On Valentine’s Day 1970, the Abortion Caravan (started by a feminist group in British Columbia) sent a letter to the government of Canada stating: ‘We consider the government of Canada to be in a state of war with the women of Canada. If steps are not taken to implement our demands…we will be forced to respond by declaring war on the Canadian government. We are angry, furious women and we demand our right to human dignity.’ Women travelled from Vancouver to Ottawa, gathering numbers as they went. The Caravan reached Ottawa on Mother’s Day and delivered coffins full of bloodied implements used to induce abortions at home to the Prime Minister’s house. As a finale, thirty-five women chained themselves to the parliamentary gallery in the House of Commons, closing Parliament for the first time in Canadian history. The work of the feminist movement and Morgentaler’s legal battles led to the 1988 Supreme Court decision to decriminalize abortion.”
Vashist goes on to outline the basic premise of the pro-choice argument, noting: “At its most basic, ‘the right to choose’ means respect and bodily sovereignty: each individual person defines and makes decisions for their own body. These decisions are made according to their own understanding of their body, morality, and reality. Furthermore, the appropriate context for these decisions is a personal and community framework, as opposed to a moral or legal code.” What Vashist refuses to acknowledge, both in her historical survey of abortion and arguments supporting the procedure, is that the pro-life debate transcends the right of a woman to choose. The rights of other family members (both men and women), and more importantly, unborn children (both male and female) need to be taken into account. Vashist also refuses to acknowledge the pro-choice movement today appears more indebted to latent racism and contemporary Western colonialism in deciding which children should be aborted than the pro-life movement.
Public date: September 30th, 2009
