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
