Canada: A Very Short Introduction by Donald Wright

Author:Donald Wright [Wright, Donald]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780191071522
Publisher: OUP Oxford
Published: 2020-06-03T00:00:00+00:00

Reproductive rights

The women’s movement in Canada in the 1960s and 1970s, sometimes called the second wave, was part of a longer historical struggle for equality. The first wave, in the late 19th century and early 20th century, had focused on social reform, access to higher education, and basic citizenship rights, including the right to vote. Now, against the backdrop of the sexual revolution, the women’s movement expanded its focus to include reproductive rights, among other priorities. In 1968 the McGill University Student Union published a Birth Control Handbook. Printed on newsprint and bound with staples, it was ordered by student groups across the country, from Dalhousie University in Halifax to Simon Fraser University in Vancouver. Distributed free of charge, supply never kept up with demand. And because it addressed both contraception and abortion, the Handbook spoke to the growing movement to legalize abortion.

The federal government amended the criminal code in 1969 to permit an abortion if a therapeutic abortion committee of not less than three medical doctors in an accredited hospital determined that the pregnancy presented a danger to the woman’s life or health. Although controversial, it was hardly radical because it merely codified what Anglo-American courts had been saying for half a century: not a single court in Canada, the United Kingdom, the United States, or Australia had convicted a woman for terminating a pregnancy when it posed a risk to her life or health. To the women’s movement, the 1969 amendment was limited at best and farcical at worst because abortion was, for the most part, still illegal. A group of women confronted Trudeau in Vancouver, branding him a male chauvinist because his vision of the just society did not include them: abortion isn’t a crime, the Vancouver Women’s Caucus told him, it’s a right. To realize that right, dramatic political action, even confrontation, was required. Someone suggested a road trip. And so, on 27 April 1970, seventeen women from the Vancouver Women’s Caucus piled into a couple of Volkswagen vans to begin the long drive to Ottawa. On top of one of the vans was a coffin, used to store luggage and to symbolize the countless women who had died seeking an illegal and unsafe abortion. Impressed by its theatricality as she watched the Abortion Caravan (Figure 4) set out from the Vancouver Court House, activist Cynthia Flood pictured an arrow aimed at the heart, the heart being Ottawa and its callous indifference to women’s rights.

4. A defining event in Canadian second wave feminism and the historical struggle for abortion rights, the Abortion Caravan drew a line in the sand: there was no going back.

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