Active History

Jessica Shaw, PhD candidate, University of Calgary

Abortion evokes strong political and emotional reactions, and tends to be framed around arguments of morality and legality. However, women have had and will continue to have abortions regardless of their morality, regardless of their legality, regardless of what the foetus may or may not be, and regardless of whether they are offered in safe medical settings, or in clandestine conditions. The need for abortion is present for people in every social class, every region, and every belief system.  As the debate about abortion rages on, physicians continue to provide women with the abortion care that they need. In Canada, abortion providers are often stigmatized as single-issue activists whose entire identities are described with the derogatory title “abortionist”.  By some, they are imagined to be anti-woman, anti-child, and anti-family, and because of this, they are targets for harassment and violence. In reality, abortion providers are mothers, fathers, grandmothers, grandfathers, daughters, sons, partners, lovers, and friends. They are physicians who support families by ensuring that each woman is able to decide if, when, and how many children to have. In Canada, most abortion providers are family physicians who offer abortion care as a part of their comprehensive medical practice.

While research consistently affirms that the majority of Canadians support abortion rights, there is a faction of society that is anti-abortion, and an even smaller faction that expresses their opposition to abortion by targeting abortion providers for harassment and violence. Most abortion providers will not face acts of violence that are personally directed at them, but most will face harassment, and all live with the awareness that they could be targeted simply for the work that they do. For both new physicians and seasoned abortion providers, there is one event in Canadian history that forever changed the climate in which abortion care is offered.

On November 8, 1994, Dr. Garson Romalis (colloquially known as Gary) survivedthe first recorded sniper attack on a Canadian abortion provider. Continue reading →

Katrina Ackerman, PhD Candidate, University of Waterloo

Recent media coverage of an Alberta doctor’s refusal to prescribe birth control to walk-in clinic patients indicates the medical profession’s ongoing struggle to balance personal morality and professional ethics. Whether a doctor should be able to deny birth control prescriptions or abortion referrals based on moral or religious grounds is a murky issue and has been prevalent since the formation of Canadian medical societies in the 1800s. The Canadian medical profession’s struggle to maintain control over abortion and contraception can be traced back to the mid-nineteenth century when, in their efforts to regulate the profession, medical societies used aspects of science and religion to argue that life begins at conception and condemned alternative medical practitioners for offering methods to terminate pregnancies. In 1892, physicians were instrumental in the criminalization of abortion. Nearly a century later, doctors held an equally prominent role in the liberalization of the procedure.[1] After decades of witnessing women attempt to control their own fertility—and many times die in the process—the Canadian Medical Association advised the federal government to amend the abortion law. In 1969, the federal government liberalized the abortion law to allow the procedure when a mother’s life or health was endangered. While doctors were prominently involved in the liberalization of the abortion law in 1969, divisions immediately heightened within the profession over the justifiability of the procedure.

The reality was that Canadian and international medical societies did not have straightforward scientific reasoning for determining when life began and could not ascertain if or when abortions were acceptable. Scientific beliefs, as well as ethical, legal, and social considerations influenced individuals’ and medical societies’ reasoning on the abortion issue. Advancements in neonatal medicine in the 1970s complicated the issue for abortion rights doctors as innovative medical technologies enabled physicians to highlight embryological development and subsequently convinced many scientifically trained professionals to question the rationality for abortions.[2] In the decade following the revised abortion law, debates over whether abortion could be considered a medically necessary act, without consideration of the fetus, polarized doctors. Continue reading →

Dr. Shannon Stettner, Special Series Guest Editor

It’s hard to study abortion without being an activist.  Reading about or hearing women’s experiences with unplanned pregnancies, past and present, and the challenges they encounter and overcome – or don’t – in their efforts to end those pregnancies is politicizing. When you study abortion experiences from the 1960s, like I do, and compare them to the experiences of women in current day New Brunswick and Prince Edward Island, you know that the issue is far from resolved.

Our conference, Abortion: The Unfinished Revolution, will be held at the University of Prince Edward Island on August 7 and 8, 2014.  When we (Colleen MacQuarrie, Tracy Penny Light and I) decided to issue a call for papers, we had no idea of the response we would get. We anticipated a small, local conference.  Instead, over the course of two days, more than 70 papers will be heard, with presenters coming from across North America, the United Kingdom, Europe, Australia, India, and Africa. Our conference is the first international academic conference on abortion in Canada.  It is clear from the response, that we have touched a nerve – or lit a spark.

The response is all the more surprising, given our location. While we recognized that holding the conference in Toronto might have raised our numbers or made logistics a little easier, our choice to hold the conference in Charlottetown, PEI was deliberate. PEI is the only province where Canadian women have no access to abortion.[1] The anti-abortion movement calls the island “a life sanctuary.” We think it’s time to bring abortion to the island – both symbolically, as we’re doing with the conference, and literally as one of our organizers, Dr. Colleen MacQuarrie, is attempting to do through her study of and activism around abortion on the island. MacQuarrie’s groundbreaking research on the effects that the lack of access to legal abortion has on the women in PEI will be highlighted in one of the posts to appear in this week’s series. Continue reading →