Kristine Kruszelnicki+Posted by on May 30, 2013 in Abortion in Canada, Featured posts, Humanism & Morality |
He broke the law and became a national hero. That’s the story of Dr. Henry Morgentaler, the abortion provider credited for Canada’s current lack of abortion laws. Dr. Morgentaler passed away of a heart attack May 29th 2013, at the age of 90.
Morgentaler has been aptly called in his biography by Catherine Dunphy, a “difficult hero”. “Difficult” may be putting it far too mildly, and “hero” naturally depends on one’s point of view. Certainly it can be said of the man who performed abortions while they were still illegal, challenging the abortion laws to the point of going to jail, that he was a consistent advocate for abortion and a true believer in his cause. It takes courage to go against the grain of one’s society, and as a Humanist and activist, I honour that in him – even if I disagree with the cause he championed.
Dr. Morgentaler’s story is a fascinating one. A Holocaust survivor, having been interned in both Auschwitz and Dachau concentration camps in his youth, he immigrated to Montreal, Canada in 1950 where he studied medicine and became a family physician. After specializing his practice to family planning and becoming one of the first physicians to perform vasectomies and to offer contraception to unmarried women, his clientele increasingly turned to him with requests for elective (non-life threatening) abortions. Abortion was illegal in Canada prior to May 14th 1969, and afterward only legal when performed in hospitals under the approval of a Therapeutic Abortion Committee. Morgentaler defied the law and was thrown in jail for his efforts, facing a decades-long legal battle in court case after court case. In January of 1988 the Supreme Court of Canada ruled that Prime Minister Trudeau’s 1969 Omnibus law on abortion violated women’s “right to life, liberty and security of the person” as per section 7 of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, and the inadequate abortion laws were struck down, leaving a legislative void on abortion in its place.
Now it has not escaped my notice as a pro-life Humanist that Dr. Henry Morgentaler also identified as a Humanist. In fact, Morgentaler was the first president of the Humanist Association of Canada, from 1968 to 1999, and he remained its honorary president after that. I had the privilege of rubbing shoulders with some of his long-time friends and colleagues at a recent Humanist Association Christmas party in Ottawa, and it was evident how revered he still is among Canada’s Humanists. The American Humanist Association likewise honours him, and named him their 1975 Humanist of the Year. I met Dr. Morgentaler briefly in 2004 and have been saddened by threats to his life and property made by more extreme opponents of abortion. As a Humanist I found him to be quite personable and couldn’t help but like him, his stance on abortion aside.
“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,” Dr. Morgentaler said in 2008. “… I believe as a medical doctor my duty was to help humans, and I did it.” Morgentaler assumed what most people assume: that opposition to abortion is primarily if not entirely religiously grounded. He also assumed that the best way to help a woman facing a crisis pregnancy is to eliminate the pregnancy, rather than the crisis. I believe he was wrong on both counts.
Pro-life Humanists are now the ones going against the grain. After all, the 1973 Humanist Manifesto II (article six) clearly names abortion as a right that should be recognized along with the right to contraception and divorce. Nevertheless, all versions of the Humanist Manifesto and its subsequent declarations lend themselves toward a belief in egalitarian treatment of all human beings. Article eleven of Manifesto II speaks eloquently of our particular obligation toward the disadvantaged and those unable to support themselves. Included in that list are “the mentally retarded, abandoned or abused children, the handicapped… [and] all who are neglected or ignored by society.” Developing humans in utero, biologically members of our species though too young to possess the strength, awareness, or physical functions for independent living, demand on account of their dependence and vulnerability more special care and support – not less. Their current age-related mental and physical state does not translate into a justification for extermination.
Dr Morgentaler frequently justified his illegal abortions by citing “necessity“. He argued that women would seek illegal and dangerous abortions if he didn’t help them out. While I appreciate that his intentions in trying to help women were for the good, I think the doctor ultimately failed in his attempt to increase freedom for women. Freedom that comes at the expense of a weaker and more vulnerable being is not freedom at all. It’s tyranny. More to the point, society has not elevated women by removing their pregnancies from the equation. The very same problems of inequality that make it so challenging for a woman to couple motherhood with career and education are not eradicated by the abortionist’s suction. They remain an entrapment for the next woman and the woman after her. Abortion puts a band-aid over society’s blistering pus while never actually addressing the root infection that causes a pregnancy and a new human life to be so problematic in the first place. If abortion appears necessary, and if any woman is so desperate to escape the trap she finds herself in that she will resort to dangerous surgery, perhaps it’s not abortion that she needs, but real choices and a reform of society itself?
Pro-life feminist and author Frederica Matthewes-Green once stated that “no woman wants an abortion as she wants an ice cream cone or a Porsche. She wants an abortion as an animal caught in a trap wants to gnaw off its own leg.” Abortion providers like Dr Morgentaler correctly perceive the trap, but they merely offer the woman a sterile knife to aid in the amputation. Real help does not sacrifice one human life at the expense of another, but goes to the source of the trap to unscrew the hinge and free both.
Dr Henry Morgentaler has died but his legacy, along with the false beliefs of abortion as the salvation and equalizer of women, are still very much alive. Believing that he was improving the lives of women, Dr Morgentaler sacrificed a generation of future women and men whose lives were cut short before they’d drawn their first breath. Pro-Life Humanists dare to imagine better. We seek a world in which all humans are equally valued and where pregnancy isn’t a desperate problem in search of a desperate solution. In the words of another feminist writer Germaine Greer: “Too many women are forced to abort by poverty, by their menfolk, by their parents … A choice is only possible if there are genuine alternatives.”
Dr Morgentaler, we are Humanists — and more than that, we are Pro-Life Humanists. Most of us are survivors of the generation your work diminished by a third, and we reject the “solution” you offered our mothers and their peers. We seek to make your “necessity” both unnecessary and unthinkable. We believe we can do better than abortion.
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