Reproductive Freedom
The Ontario Coalition for Abortion Clinics and the Campaign to Overturn the Federal Abortion Law

CAROLYN EGAN & LINDA GARDNER

A historic battle took place in this country in the late twentieth century between the women’s movement and the Canadian state. Advocates for women’s rights won a major victory when the Supreme Court of Canada overturned the federal abortion law in January 1988. At the time, the campaign for full access to free abortion was situated in the broader context of reproductive freedom. Abortion rights was seen as only one of a number of demands of the women’s movement in the fight for reproductive rights for all.1

Before the law was struck down, women had access to abortion, but it was a very privileged access. In 1969, legislation was passed that allowed abortions to be performed if they took place in an approved or accredited hospital with the consent of a Therapeutic Abortion Committee. The committee had to comprise three doctors whose role was to determine whether the continuation of a pregnancy would impact on the physical or mental health of the woman. If they decided that it would, the woman would be allowed an abortion. There was uneven interpretation of the law across the country, and many hospitals did not establish committees. The law was unjust in that it denied women the right to make decisions over their reproductive health.

In practice, the 1969 law resulted in very inequitable access. Women with economic resources who could afford a private gynecologist or travel to the United States or Montréal could get an abortion. Many racialized, Indigenous, working-class, rural, and young women did not have access. In spite of the claims that Canada had universal health care, there was a two-tiered system.

In Toronto, workers from the Immigrant Women’s Health Centre, the Birth Control and VD Information Centre, and the Hassle Free Clinic decided that they had to challenge a system that was denying abortions to many of those using their services. They spoke every day with women who were being treated in a humiliating and degrading manner and were made to leap through hoops to access abortion. They felt strongly that the federal law was fundamentally flawed: not only did it take the decision out of the hands of women but it was racist and class biased in its application. They and others (ourselves included) formed the Ontario Coalition for Abortion Clinics (OCAC) in 1982.

The group thought long and hard about how best to change an increasingly desperate situation for so many women. We looked at the province of Québec, where CLSCs (Centres locaux de services communautaires, or local community services centres) and Centres de santé des femmes (women’s health centres) were providing abortions to women in their own communities. We modelled our campaign on that of our sisters in Québec. The strategy involved a combination of a doctor willing to challenge the law and a broad and representative movement willing to fight for the necessary changes.

OCAC was a grassroots, activist organization. The immediate objectives were to overturn the federal law and to legalize free-standing clinics providing medically insured abortions. The membership set out to win full access to free abortion for all women. OCAC made clear in its organizing that it should be a fundamental right for women to make the decision to terminate a pregnancy and that the facilities must be in place to allow them to do so. Members also felt that the movement needed an analysis that went much further. OCAC believed that women must also have the right to bear the children they choose to bear. This was a perspective that activists from the Immigrant Women’s Health Centre had put forward in earlier campaigns to remove barriers to abortion and sexual health services.

We were aware of the limits of the notion of “choice.” Full access to free abortion, as significant an advance as that would be, does not guarantee that all women have choices in directing their lives or in having or raising children. The definition of “choice” was broadened in our organizing. OCAC stated that for all women to have real choices in our society, they require safe and effective birth control services in their own languages and their own communities, decent jobs, paid parental leave, child care, the right to live freely and openly regardless of their sexuality, an end to forced or coerced sterilization, employment equity, and, of course, full access to free abortion. All were required if women were to have reproductive freedom.2

OCAC tried to ensure that the demand for abortion access was never seen in isolation but as one of a number of interdependent struggles. We tried to make this concrete by challenging the coerced sterilization that Indigenous women, women with disabilities, and black women were facing. We held joint forums on the issues, at which women spoke about the injustices that they were experiencing. Health care workers told us that Therapeutic Abortion Committees sometimes refused abortions unless a woman agreed to be sterilized. We fought for child care as a woman’s right and campaigned against extra billing by doctors. AIDS activists spoke at our rallies, describing the pressures exerted on HIV-positive women to have abortions and tubal ligations. We worked very closely with the Midwives Collective.

We believed that the choice to have a child can never be free in a society where many women earn much less than men, where quality child care and affordable housing are not available, where inequity and discrimination are systemic. We found this reproductive rights perspective (today often referred to as reproductive justice) to be vital to the success of our organizing, because it reflected the reality of women’s lives, broadened the base of the movement, and explicitly dealt with issues of class and race. A long campaign against two levels of government and an organized anti-choice movement began.

OCAC worked with Dr. Henry Morgentaler, who, in 1983, opened a clinic challenging the federal Criminal Code. He agreed to establish the clinic if we mobilized broad support and built a movement to defend it. The clinic became a symbol of women’s resistance to an unjust law. Women made appointments for abortions at the clinic knowing full well that the government viewed it to be illegal. They faced police surveillance and anti-choice harassment, standing up to both and demanding their right to abortion by defying the law. They were a varied group, including women without health cards, Indigenous women from northern reserves, and women who could not speak English. They were the true heroines of the movement, risking exposure and arrest, and they continued to come. Safe houses were established in the neighbourhood, and volunteer escorts accompanied them to the clinic.

It did not take long before the facility was raided by the police: Drs. Morgentaler, Scott, and Smoling were arrested and the medical equipment seized. This was not unexpected, and OCAC had been building broad support. We knew we were going to be in a long, drawn-out campaign. We had to change the balance of power in the country; while the issue had to be in the courts because of the arrests, the critical task was mobilizing the strong support that we knew was there for women’s reproductive rights. Judges do not sit in isolation, and we had to show that the law was unenforceable and ensure that a jury would not convict the doctors.

OCAC took a mass action approach. We did not leave the campaign to the lawyers or to the lobbying of politicians. We believed that tens of thousands of women and men would come into the streets across the country to fight for women’s reproductive freedom. Groups took up the cause in every province, and the Canadian Abortion Rights Action League fought side by side with us. Members and allies spoke at labour conventions, to community organizations, on campuses, and to faith communities. At the very start, we won a resolution at the Ontario Federation of Labour convention, and individual unions followed suit. Women Working with Immigrant Women in Toronto was a strong supporter, helping to organizing meetings in diverse communities. We began building step by step, and the popular support grew.

In linking its various struggles together, OCAC was able to build a wide campaign through demonstrations, marches, and rallies in which thousands participated. Speakers from many communities spoke about the situation they were facing and about the importance of working together to address the inequities that so many women were up against. We always tried to involve ourselves in movement building. Through our organizing, we were able to broaden participation in the campaign to trade unionists, students, AIDS activists, people of colour, and immigrant women’s organizations. We understood that without active participation and the support of thousands, no change would occur.

After the raid of the Morgentaler Clinic, we were caught in the courts for almost a year on a constitutional challenge, through which the state tried to demobilize the movement. An Ontario Supreme Court Justice ruled that the federal abortion law was constitutional. He stated that the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms protects only those rights that are spelled out in law or “rooted deeply in our traditions.” Well, abortion is certainly rooted in women’s traditions. In the actual trial, the jury unanimously rejected this interpretation by finding the doctors innocent. The government appealed the acquittal, but the clinic reopened and the movement gained tremendous momentum.

Our goal was to build a visible, mass movement that fought as one for women’s reproductive freedom. The full message was often lost in the media presentations, where most of the attention was given to the single issue of overturning the federal abortion law. We undoubtedly could have done it better. Achieving the best balance between short- and long-term goals, between the polemical value of the “choice” slogan and the constraints of such arguments was difficult sometimes. We didn’t always make the right decisions and were under tremendous pressure with so much at stake. There were many debates about the best way forward. Strategic complexities and dilemmas were not made easier in a movement that was constantly under direct attack from the state and the conservative right.3

OCAC was a voluntary organization raising money though donations, garage sales, and benefits, with only one staff person at the height of the struggle. We openly debated questions, scheduling general membership meetings every two weeks, and always tried to choose the course of action that would involve the largest number of people. At strategic junctures, we advertised open public strategy meetings to involve everyone interested in determining our next steps. Many people who could not commit themselves to the organization in an ongoing way could attend such meetings.

When the Supreme Court finally overturned the existing abortion law in 1988, it was through the strength of a broad and representative movement. It was a collective victory in which tens of thousands played an active role. The fact that OCAC understood that the state was not neutral and was not acting in the interests of women was critical to the success of our campaign. We believed that only a mass movement could change the balance of forces in the interest of all women.

There was a spontaneous demonstration of thousands of supporters outside the Morgentaler Clinic when the decision of the Supreme Court was announced. Women and men were dancing in the street! Similar rallies erupted across the country. Freestanding clinics were legalized in Ontario, fully covered by the health care system, and clinics began to open in other parts of the country as well. A number of facilities in Ontario were able to provide abortions to women without health cards as a result of our organizing.

It did not take long before the Conservative government in Ottawa began the process of introducing new legislation recriminalizing abortion, with Bill C-43 in 1990. Because of the strong roots that had been developed, a major campaign against a new law was launched. There was wide support from groups such as the National Organization of Immigrant and Visible Minority Women, the Canadian Labour Congress, the National Council of Jewish Women, the Federation des femmes du Québec, the United Church of Canada, the Canadian Medical Association, AIDS Action Now! and a large range of provincial and local organizations across the country. On national days of action, thousands poured into the streets. Tragically, during this period, a young woman in Toronto died from a self-induced abortion because she believed a legal procedure was not available.

During the campaign against the new law and for increased access, anti-choice forces continued another assault. Operation Rescue, as they called it, had started in Toronto in the fall of 1988 and attempted to blockade the entrance to the Morgentaler Clinic. They physically and verbally harassed women seeking abortions. OCAC organized defence of clinics in Toronto, a number of which had opened after the law was struck down, rejecting the argument that it should be left to the police to protect these facilities. Supporters would sometimes spend the night when we were given advance warning and would be outside waiting for Operation Rescue members to arrive in the early morning. We would link arms and chant: “Racist, sexist, anti-gay, born again bigots, go away” and “Campaign Life, your name’s a lie. You don’t care if women die”—chants that reflected the politics of the campaign.

It was not unusual for members of the United Steelworkers, the Black Women’s Coalition, Women Working with Immigrant Women, EcoMedia, AIDS Action Now! and the Canadian Auto Workers, along with Indigenous activists, to stand shoulder to shoulder to defend the clinics. Because of this strong mobilization and community support, Operation Rescue was stopped. This speaks to the strength of the movement-building strategy and the active alliance building. Those who defended the services believed that the clinics were legal and accessible as a result of their collective struggle, and they were committed to defending them. This broad support created the political pressure to defeat Bill C-43 in the Senate in January 1991, after it narrowly passed in the House of Commons.

As Women Working with Immigrant Women (WWIW) said in a statement when the law was defeated,

Today, we applaud the death of Bill C43 acknowledging that collective visible actions by many different constituencies led to its defeat. We strongly support OCAC’s position that the legal right to choose, as important as it is, is meaningless unless fully funded services exist to give every woman the opportunity to make that choice in her own language and her own community. WWIW will continue to work with OCAC to pressure the federal government to implement the Canada Health Act to ensure that every province provides full access to free abortion and to insist that the provinces provide this critical service with all the other demands that will ensure real choices in our lives.4

There are now more than thirty free-standing clinics providing funded abortions across the country. Access is much wider than when the OCAC campaign began in the early 1980s, and sexual health services are more widely available. A major victory was finally won when, in response to a legal challenge by Abortion Access Now PEI, the province announced its intention to make abortion services available by the end of 2016, at which point women living in Prince Edward Island will no longer be forced to go to the mainland to access abortions. But the fight for reproductive justice is far from over. New Brunswick still refuses to fund clinic procedures. Hospital amalgamations and health care cuts are reducing reproductive services in many areas. Women are still being harassed as they enter clinics. The Harper government initially refused to fund International Planned Parenthood Federation and then decided to give money on the condition that it be allocated only in countries where abortion is illegal. The Liberal government elected in 2015 has reversed this decision. In Canada, there is no national child care program, equal pay for work of equal value is still a dream for many, employment equity has not been implemented, systemic discrimination still exists, and many of the other services necessary for women to have real choices in their lives are not in place. Private members’ bills are regularly being introduced in the House of Commons to create barriers for women to access abortion. To date, all have been defeated.

Support for reproductive justice is still very strong across the country. While the overall strategic situation has changed and will continue to change, the lessons of the campaign waged in the 1980s still remain relevant. The principles and tactics that were used created a broad-based movement that overturned the federal abortion law and created a network of clinics, making abortion much more accessible for women who were previously denied that service. We must continue to put pressure on the federal and provincial governments today so that all women have what is required to live their lives with the dignity and respect they deserve. What we won are initial and partial victories, to be sure, but still major gains for women’s reproductive justice.