Canada’s long struggle for reproductive rights

The Toronto Star
Canada’s long struggle for reproductive rights
Liberal Leader Justin Trudeau is simply looking to place intimate reproductive decisions back in the hands of individual Canadian women.

As a historian, I have watched the response to Justin Trudeau’s abortion policy with interest. The reaction from pundits has been frustrating but informative, and demonstrates the continued fight from reproductive rights advocates and their allies like Trudeau to put the intimate decisions about contraception and abortion into the hands of the women they affect.

Canadian women have always sought to control their fertility. Extended breastfeeding and withdrawal were widely used by First Nations people and European colonists. In the 18th and 19th centuries, pessaries and vaginal douching were also used to prevent contraception. Women seeking to end pregnancies took pills such as Dr. Love’s “celebrated pills for suppressed menstruation” to induce miscarriages.

Before the 19th century, abortion before the “quickening,” or first fetal movements usually during the fourth month of pregnancy, was not illegal. In 1810, New Brunswick became the first Canadian jurisdiction to criminalize abortion regardless of when it occurred, and other Canadian jurisdictions followed suit, culminating in the criminalization of all forms of contraception in 1892. This was a response to the dramatic decline in fertility among Canadian women at the end of the 19th century. In Ontario, the fertility rate declined by 44 per cent between 1871 and 1901 as Ontarians used the tools available to them to limit the size of their families.

Despite the changes to the Criminal Code, women continued to seek to control their bodies. Activists such as Dr. Elisabeth Bagshaw, who directed the Hamilton Birth Control Society, and Dorothea Palmer, who worked as a nurse for the Parents’ Information Bureau near Ottawa, risked imprisonment to provide birth control options during the Great Depression....

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