Since it hasn't gotten notice here, I want to note the passing of Dr. Henry Morgentaler in Toronto, a few months past his 90th birthday. All his obituaries remembered him best for what he fought for most his life for: the legalization of abortion on request in Canada. South of the 49th (or, in my part of the country, the 45th) parallel, we should take notice because it reminds us just how fortunate we were in our effort to do the same thing—and how much we still need to do to make reproductive freedom a practical reality.
I actually had the honor of seeing Morgentaler once. The obituaries mention that several of the freestanding clinics he opened were firebombed. I saw it the day after it happened.
It was 1992, and I was living in the Buffalo area. My wife and I had been among the many people who turned out to keep the Niagara Frontier's abortion providers open during Operation Rescue's "Spring of Life" It took a lot of early mornings, a lot of shouting and a lot of cold weather, but we prevailed.
Perhaps because of that, a month later the news came down from Toronto: An abortion clinic in that city had been bombed, the first time that had ever happened in Canada. Since there had been butyric-acid attacks on the Buffalo-area clinics around the same time, one had to presume they were related.
Quite a few activists from Toronto had come down to stand on line with us, and at Buffalo United for Choice, we didn't forget that. A small detachment of us, myself included, went up the Queen E to join our Canadian colleagues (mainly, a lot of U of T students; it was their neighborhood)Queen's Park in staging a protest march (Wow, I remember thinking to myself as we held our signs and chanted marching around while seeing all the very visible signs of Canada around us—the maple-leaf flag fluttering gaily in the sun on a gorgeous day, "Lotto Centre", TTC trams passing us by and the CN tower in the distance—I'm a real activist now ... I actually crossed an international border to participate in a political demonstration!)
The first stop was the bombed clinic. I remember the Canadians just looking utterly shocked ... they really never expected anything like this to ever happen there. Morgentaler came out, spoke about his determination to do what he did, what he had done to legalize abortion in freestanding clinics in Canada—things most of the crowd already knew about at the time. He vowed to continue, and with everyone's spirits up, we all went on to Queen's Park to finish the day.
At the time I didn't much about him, other than him having been the plaintiff in the Canadian Supreme Court case which had struck down Canada's abortion law about five years earlier.
Later I learned more. And I realized why he'd been so almost nonchalant that day in Toronto when all his fellow Canadians were so dumbstruck.
For one thing, he was a Holocaust survivor. That always drove the antis nuts. In Canada, just as here, they love to wrap their cause in the mantle of those who resisted the Holocaust. For someone who was actually there, like Morgentaler, to be on the other side totally did not compute. And for him to have used that experience to justify his decision to perform abortions—unthinkable!
I only learned from the New York Times obit I linked to just how much Holocaust Morgentaler survived. As the saying goes, he has to have gone straight to heaven because he's served his time in hell.
When the Nazis invaded his native Poland, Morgentaler was 16. His father, a union organizer, was spared what was to come when the Gestapo killed him not long afterwards. Ms. Morgentaler and her children were herded into the Łódź ghetto—the second largest in the country, and one of the most brutal. His sister died there.
In 1944, when the Nazis decided it was time to deport the survivors, Morgentaler, his brother and mother hid out in a closet. It worked for two days. They were caught and sent to Auschwitz, where Mrs. Morgentaler died (the story doesn't say, but I'd have to presume she didn't pass the selection and was gassed on arrival, like so many other infirm, elderly and children). Four days later the brothers were shipped to Dachau, where they remained until it was liberated by US forces in 1945.
So it was probably not too much of a sacrifice for Henry Morgentaler to risk jail time by performing abortions without the approval of the hospital committee, as Canadian law required at that time. Four times he was prosecuted, four times a jury came back with acquittals.
However, in Canada at that time that wasn't the end of the story. The Crown could, and did, appeal not-guilty verdicts. In Quebec, where the Catholic Church has a lot of influence, they did, and the acquittal was overturned. He served 10 months of his 18-month sentence before being released early due to a heart attack. I imagine that, compared to the ghetto and the camps (and there are not many Holocaust survivors who survived so much of both as he seems to have) a Canadian federal prison was practically Club Med.
Another acquittal in Ontario was overturned, and this one went all the way to Canada's Supreme Court, which in its 1988 ruling overturned the abortion law he'd been prosecuted under. It has not been replaced, meaning there are not even the restrictions that Roe v. Wade allows.
Was that enough for Morgentaler? He'd fought for that for years, but continued challenging provincial laws that left abortions unfunded or otherwise inaccessible. A mere ten years ago he still had to take New Brunswick to court over this.
It's amazing to me that what it took a few years to accomplish in our court system, with just one case, took 20 years and four cases in Canada. Sometimes I agree, though, with Justice Ginsburg that such an easy legal victory denied us the chance to establish a more robust pro-choice movement that Morgentaler's efforts were more able to accomplish in Canada.
But his example should nevertheless inform us on both sides of the border as we fight the fights we still have to fight. Thank you for everything, Dr. Morgentaler. Few deserve their reward so much as you.