Thank you Henry Morgentaler, Justice Dickson, Justice Wilson, three juriesful of Canadians of surpassing good common sense, and all the committed activists, including some law-talkin' persons, who got us to R. v. Morgentaler this day in 1988. Twenty years ago today (and with a slight refinement in a case heard the following year), Canada became the only country in the Western world to have no abortion law at all. In theory, in principle, and strictly speaking.
I have been very moved to watch the tributes to Dr Morgentaler and the Court scrolling past me today, the justly famous lines from Justice Dickson's strong endorsement of women's autonomy as a Charter right (from which I take my title) and Justice Wilson's passionate if civil defiance of those who would objectify a woman's life by grading her on gestational potential.
I was forty-two years old when the Supreme Court of Canada declared that no one -- as in no one, including panels of condescending doctors or psychiatrists -- needed to oversee or second-guess the understanding and will of any woman about what would be best for her own body, her own life, and often, most probably, the lives of many close to her. The Morgentaler decision affirmed women's full humanity, that women can be trusted to think for themselves and others, and if that is still contested in some quarters, that is what is being contested.
I have been chewing over a very thoughtful post of Dr Dawg's this morning (besides crying intermittently over so many stories that I remember today), so I will continue to chew on that a little more on the turn.
Dr Dawg started out to provoke us this morning by declaring that it's "not about choice." His deeper point is that many women -- most women? -- are still not free enough to be making free choices, and I can hardly disagree. Most people are not free enough, especially from financial fears, to be choosing almost anything freely, and that includes having babies, just as it does doing the bathroom or the kitchen reno.
It's true that choice is one of those words that the Rovian right were clever enough to misappropriate from the left sometime back there in the late eighties when we-all weren't paying attention. For the young women who chained themselves to the Commons gallery seats in 1970, choice meant a human right, their right to be considered autonomous human beings, a frustration that I suspect many men may still not quite feel on the pulse.
But I grant that "choice" has become a sneak word of the right and then just a debased sign of our deeply debased consumer culture. Should women give it up?
In answer to Dr Dawg, all I can think to say is to remind him of the deeper historical parallels. Outlawing slavery did not immediately change the lives of all the Africans who were transported to the Caribbean or North America or northern Europe. It "freed" them, but then ... Did it bring them social justice? Hardly even yet, and how long has that taken?
And yet it was a triumph to outlaw slavery, a triumph of the mind, a social triumph, a place to stand for those who would fight for genuine social justice.
We still face serious discrimination against women's autonomy in Canada on many fronts, including this one. In PEI there is no access to safe abortion at all; in New Brunswick, hospitals defy the will of the Court by imposing the old regime of paternalistic medical committees on women seeking abortions. And everywhere there are practical problems of access, and then ... there is fear:
Escorted by security personnel, Morgentaler left the conference shortly after 10:30 a.m. According to his Toronto clinic staff, they were responding to a telephoned death threat."The who's who of the abortion world was in that room," said Shayna Hodgson, Morgentaler's assistant.
"The threat might not have been directed at Henry, but security was taking no chances."
Vancouver physician and abortion provider Dr. Gary Romalis also left the symposium.
In 1994, Romalis was shot in the leg by a sniper while eating breakfast in the kitchen of his home.
I'm old enough to know that these fights take a long time. A long, long time. But the words matter. The words set down in law matter. The Morgentaler decision was not just lucky, and not just the result of clever lawyering. (Dr Dawg: you gotta take that back.) In itself, it would not have happened without several popular groundswells -- I keep thinking of those juries, and how their nullifications, true nullifications, must have affected the Court.
And I remember all the women who fought for so long, with their own bodies, for their own bodies. That was no legal luck, no clever lawyering. That was real life, and our time had come. The Court knew that and accepted that.
No one ever liberates anyone else. People liberate themselves. Lawyers are ok, but girls are strong.
Forgive the appropriation, but I loved this guy. If I could have found him moving through "A Change Is Gonna Come," I would have given you that, but hey! -- this is the greatest song he ever sang, and he sang it to us girls. God bless, and let's hear it for real sex.
Otis Redding, "Try a Little Tenderness"
skdadl, thank you so much for your moving and thoughtful post! Brava! I rise to my feet, my hands clapping, in acknowledgment of your words and wisdom.
Hugs.
(And Otis is wunnerful!)
Hi, skdadl,
Hope I didn't leave the impression that R. v. Morgentaler wasn't the fine victory that it was.
I wish I could believe that on-the-ground organizing did it. The juries certainly contributed to the Morgentaler Amendment, but I confess I can't trace the thread from our organizing to the SCC decision on S.251. I'm not sure the courts give a damn about popular will, or Latimer would be a free man today.
Just before the court challenge on the constitutionality of s. 251 went forward, I had proposed that we engage in massive civil disobedience by getting thousands of people to buy shares in (then illegal) abortion clinics. My proposal was that we render the law a dead letter, like the one against contraception.
In their wisdom, CARAL ploughed ahead, and they won. Morris Manning, the lawyer involved, was virulently anti-union, having represented Merve Lavigne in a case that challenged the right of unions to become politically involved. (He lost.) I left the board of CARAL at about that time.
As a PSAC union official later on, I would have loved to have said that we won pay equity on the ground, but, again, the truth was that our experts beat their experts. That doesn't mean that the victory wasn't worth having, only that it wasn't won by mass action.
I celebrate the victory of R. v. Morgentaler. I'm a fussy kind of leftist, though, and I was hoping in my article to place that victory in context--but I certainly didn't intend to diminish the victory for women that it clearly was. I'm sorry if it came across that way.
A very fine post skdadl. Thank you.
And yet they still don't get it. A radio show on today asked the question, "This country has not had an abortion law for twenty years. Are we better off now?"
Of course, that's not the question. I'M better off now, thank you very much Dr. Morgentaler and everyone. This law (or lack thereof) is directed to individuals, women though we may be.
While I'm convinced that we as a society are better off with a few less welfare cases, gang members and drug addicts, it doesn't matter that I can't prove it because that's not the point.
Hi, Dr Dawg, and I certainly didn't mean to suggest that you were diminishing any victory. You were one of the activists, and you're one of the people I was celebrating.
I suppose that I was trying to get at something more Geisty, something I still can't put all that well. I just don't believe that anyone's experts could or would have come up with these arguments or decisions twenty years before, or fifty years before. The law-talkin' gyus and grils may often be narrow and crafty, but they are never not working in context, as none of us is. I believe that the history matters, the history made by slow shifts in the minds and attitudes of ordinary people. When that goes on long enough, yes, the smarty-pantses can appear to leap suddenly to legal success, but I don't think that that happens outside of a changed social context.
Anyway, that was the only point I wanted to make. I admired your thoughtful post yesterday very much and was very grateful to read it. It is great history in itself, inside information that few of the rest of us had. Thank you again.
I've posted a link to this and to other rebuttal in a quick update at my place.