Dr. Henry Morgentaler, Rest In Peace

Dead at 90 years of age. Years well lived in a determined battle to confront an ill he saw before him, and unrelentingly unwilling to allow himself to falter, though he paid a considerable price. When Dr. Morgentaler challenged Canada's anti-abortion laws he was derided, slandered, arrested, and incarcerated. But his pursuit of justice for half of the country's residents led him to persevere.

No one else with the authority of an outspoken, resolute medical practitioner bothered to champion the right of women to choose when and under what conditions they would bear a child.

"I decided to break the law to provide a necessary medical service because women were dying at the hands of butchers and incompetent quacks, and there was no one there to help them. The law was barbarous, cruel and unjust. I had been in a concentration camp and I knew what suffering was. If I can ease suffering, I feel perfectly justified in doing so."

"If I should die tomorrow, I could say I have accomplished something with my life. The fact that some people are opposed to abortion on religious grounds doesn't bother me as long as they are not allowed to influence other people by force or by other means. The situation in Canada is much better than in most other countries in the sense that abortion is practised by good physicians under good conditions. I believe as a medical doctor my duty was to help humans, and I did it."

His critics, vociferous with rage against this man, made comparisons to what he was doing, freeing women from the burden and pain of carrying a foetus when they had no wish to bear a child, to the abhorrently ghastly medical experimentation done by Nazi Germany's Josef Mengele. Hysterical condemnation of abortion likened it to a 'holocaust' of the innocent unborn.

These are easy enough charges to toss about; people having no idea what the Holocaust accomplished in beggaring the world of millions of Jews whose numbers have never since recovered. These were living, breathing human beings of all ages. They were not 'unborn children', on the cusp of being.

They existed as full-fledged, thinking, feeling human beings and then those lives vanished in a voluminous cloud of ash darkening the sky in a paroxysm of triumphalist genocide.

If anyone wanted to know what deprivation and horror, fear and carnage really resembled, they could ask Dr. Morgentaler, for he was very familiar with desolation, loss and anguish. And he had no wish to inflict it upon others. His wish was to remove the potential for all of that from the lives of women.

And he succeeded. At least in Canada, he did. For the most part, since there are still pockets of resistance to women's most basic entitlements -- withholding that right of abortion.

When Dr. Morgentaler opened the country's first free-standing abortion clinic at 2990 Honore-Beaugrand Street in east-end Montreal, abortion was illegal; punishable by the law in a most dramatic fashion. Anyone convicted of performing an abortion for any reason other than that the pregnancy endangered the life of the mother -- to which a panel of doctors at an accredited hospital would have to agree -- could be jailed for life.

It was also the time that selling or advertising any kind of contraception was illegal, even within pharmacies, and doing so could lead to a jail term.

"I have a vision, a dream that all people should be treated in a humane, compassionate way", Dr. Morgentaler declared, paraphrasing Dr. Martin Luther King's 1963 declaration of human rights entitlements, as he opened that Montreal clinic in 1970. That same year he was arrested, charged with two counts of performing illegal abortions.

He would be arrested and acquitted by juries on a number of occasions. In 1974 his jury acquittal was overturned by the Quebec Court of Appeal, and he was imprisoned for a ten-month period, until another government came to power and released him bowing to the will of the majority in an unspoken social covenant.

TOBIN GRIMSHAW, THE OTTAWA CITIZEN    Dr. Henry Morgentaler greets the crowd before being awarded with a lifetime achievement award from PPO and the Pro-Choice Canada Coalition, part of the National Day of Action for Choice on Elgin st. Sunday April 25, 2004. 

In 1988 the Supreme Court of Canada struck down Canada's abortion law as unconstitutional. Later, the Progressive Conservative government of Brian Mulroney attempted to introduce Bill C-43, permitting abortions in the case of a woman's proven mental, physical or psychological health being affected by carrying a foetus to term. Both patient and doctor could face prison if such conditions were not met under the law.

In an instance where the Chamber of Sober Second Thought performed its duty to the country and its citizens, the Senate of Canada defeated the bill that had been passed in the House of Commons.