Stephen Harper's American Republican-style Bible Thumping Conservatives have still not given up their obsession with trying to control the ovaries of all Canadian women from puberty to menopause
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The debate is over: Time to honour Henry Morgentaler
Last Updated: Wednesday, July 2, 2008 | 7:06 PM ET
Heather Mallick CBC News
I laughed out loud on hearing Dr. Henry Morgentaler had been given the
Order of Canada. I figured it was a hoax.
Every time I had written about his great courage and his incalculable
rescues of individual Canadians, it reminded the misanthrope in me
that we're not the type of people who reward someone for sticking his
neck out.
Canadians value prudence and caution. A man who takes an almost
suicidal risk, as Morgentaler did when he took on the federal
government over its ban on abortion rights for women, is in our eyes a
gambler, not a hero. We don't like mavericks. We frown on people who
cash in their RRSPs early, tsk tsk.
And we don't like women much either, I notice, but Morgentaler has
always liked women and has always helped us. This small now-frail
person went to jail for us.
I like that in a man.
For his commitment
After I had stopped laughing, I gulped and searched the Governor
General's website for the words that justified his honour. I read "For
his commitment to increased health care options for women, his
determined efforts to influence Canadian public policy," etc.
That sounds like what you'd say to a retiring insurance agent who had
campaigned for acupuncture to be added to female employees' health
benefits plans nationwide. It doesn't capture the drama of what life
was like pre-Morgentaler, with girls bleeding to death from back-alley
abortions, their bowels protruding through a crevasse torn into the
uterus and massive infections from filthy instruments or poisoned
twigs used as abortifacients.
Things are more civilized now, we think. Every child a wanted child,
as Morgentaler says. You can take Plan B, or the abortion pill, or
have a medical abortion in a clinic or perhaps a hospital, correct?
But as I always tell young people (and indeed old people), women
should never underestimate how much they are hated. For their own
peculiar reasons, some men and some women target women at their most
vulnerable. There is something about a pregnant woman that brings out
the bully.
An epic survivor
Morgentaler, with great support from allies and his wife, Arlene
Leibovitch, has endured decades of calumny in his own country for
standing up in defence of the bullied. I don't know why his opponents
often email me about his Jewishness — I have grasped that fact, thanks
— but anti-Semitism has without a doubt been a factor in the political
and personal campaigns against him. Jew-hating is as universal as the
bullying of females apparently.
I resent this, as much as I resent the fact that Morgentaler's windows
have to be bulletproof or that I have to watch his back when I dine
with him in restaurants. Someone might shoot him or slash him. It has
happened to other abortion providers.
I keep flashing back to tales of his childhood in Lodz, Poland where
he was bullied by other children. "Jew! You killed Jesus Christ!" I
remember what Morgentaler has told me about Lodz, about how he had a
repeated dream of being surrounded by Nazi guards in uniform. In 1944,
he was taken to Auschwitz by train, his mother was sent off for
immediate gassing, and he scarcely survived his time there, literally
dodging bullets in the last days of the Second World War.
That destructive element
Times passed. He became a doctor in Montreal. Life was sweet, life was
downright cushy. And Morgentaler then did what few of Hitler's and
Mengele's surviving young targets ever had the will or the desire to
do. He broke the law, knowing he would be imprisoned again by
uniformed guards; he would relive his fears of the worst moments of
the most violent century ever endured by mankind.
I cannot even imagine that kind of courage. I do not possess it.
The words of another Pole, the novelist Joseph Conrad, have always
lingered when I think of Henry Morgentaler. In his 1900 novel Lord
Jim, a young man who wants to be a hero is advised, "The way is to the
destructive element submit yourself, and with the exertion of your
hands and feet in the water make the deep, deep sea keep you up."
This "destructive element" is what Morgentaler has dived into,
repeatedly. He has faced down tormentors, killers, torturers, racists,
hostile crowds, cops, religious zealots, personal hurts, poverty, ill
health in old age, every destructive element the world has on offer.
I swear, there is something about it that attracts him, as if he has
to prove his moral worth to himself over and over again.
What do we debate next?
The Order of Canada is particularly touching, coming at a time when
politicians are held in deserved low regard. But the truth is that
honouring him assists the Order by giving it welcome publicity, and it
also benefits the anti-choicers, small in number as they are, because
it gives them a platform to complain about a human right that is no
longer up for debate.
I always refuse to join such "debates." Is an individual woman's body
a private place or a public cavity to be prodded and examined
according to religious doctrine?
What are we going to debate next? Should women be allowed to retain
their own legs? Or are they public legs?
Women's rights are still under siege. Bill C-484 is succeeding in the
House of Commons right now, thanks to Conservative scheming and
Liberal cowardice.
It would make it twice the crime to kill a pregnant woman, the key
being that the fetus is the second victim. This is a sly, emotion-
tugging way to give the fetus personhood, although the Supreme Court
has already explicitly denied this.
Women are persons. I thought we decided that in 1929.
Morgentaler is 85 now. The Supreme Court ruled in his favour in 1988.
The fight for women's rights last crested in the 1980s and despite the
harrowing attacks since then, there are no women giving feminism a
public face.
I call myself a feminist, but only reluctantly because it's like
declaring yourself in the fight against leprosy. Everyone thinks
leprosy was cured long ago.
Sadly, feminists are partly to blame for this dilemma. They're human.
As they aged, they worked on preserving their own turf — economic,
academic and personal glorification — without welcoming younger women
into the battle.
I want women in their twenties to study Dr. Morgentaler's fight. I
want them to dive deep into the destructive element, as he did, and
with constant movement, keep themselves afloat.