Why do we have Abortion-on-request in Canada?

[Karen]

Legally, abortion in Canada did not have to play out as a policy of
abortion-on-request. Abortion was (is) supposed to be a decision made
between a woman and a doctor. For any given abortion, the decision
arrived at, could be 'no'. Yet in practice, in Canada, you don't see
woman and doctors making the decision together. You see women doing
it alone. And without the advice from doctors. Mostly, women see
nurse/counselors before abortion, and the doctor is more like a
machine doing the job that a participant in a decision. The nurse/
counselor has a main objective of ensuring the woman was not coerced.
The counseling only lasts 20-30 minutes. That's only long enough to
talk about whether or not someone forced you, to talk about the
procedure itself (*and sometimes this doesn't even happen), to talk
about drugs and next steps , and to sign up forms, take a medical
history, give consent. Where is the 'decision time' that a doctor and
a woman have together? The doctor may have done many abortions, met
many women after abortion and before abortion, and have some unspoken
communication to pass on. The woman, may not be able to speak her
fear or her unknowns, yet the doctor might know them. It is the time
spent together, trading energies, and sharing knowledge, that can
ripen into the right decision. Abuse is a factory approach, such as
the NAF takes, and Morgentaler's clinics take, where you have 3 people
in the decision, and energies shifting and never able to settle into
what is right.