Abortion – The Origins of the Abortion Campaign

By Pat (Hoffer) Davitt

She was very young. Not that I was that much older, but I was a grad student, and she was probably just in her first or second year. I didn’t know her. She stopped me in the hall outside the classrooms in the quadrangle, and I could see that she was very upset, nervous, teary-eyed. Oh, oh! Trouble.

She was pregnant. She didn’t want to be. She wanted it to be finished, over – a problem to be solved. She wanted an abortion.

The thing was, although I was an older, and therefore wiser, woman (in the eyes of the younger and more vulnerable), I didn’t know anyone or anywhere that she (and several others in the same predicament as time went on) could approach for actual help. I sought advice from some of my women graduate friends, and we were all at a loss…and some of them had had the same plea for help directed to them as well (different women; same desperation).

Several of us at Simon Fraser University were activists in Students for a Democratic University (SDU: our Canadian take-off on SDS in the States); we knew that this was a social problem we might have to deal with at some point in our lives, and we also knew that the male members of SDU would not want to be involved in anything having to do with reproductive rights and wrongs. For them, that was a “women’s thing” for which they had little interest and no talent. We were on our own.

And really, that’s how our branch of Women’s Liberation started: with the societal issue(s) which didn’t affect, engage, or impose upon men directly.

We had our first of many women-only meetings, which quickly identified a surprising number of social issues that were of more concern to women than to men, including the reality of lower wages for women doing the same work as men, discrimination in hiring and promoting women, unions that didn’t respond very actively to the problems of their female members, responsibility for child and family nurturance and care, and of course: abortion and how to get one.

As Justice Minister in 1967, Pierre Elliott Trudeau had introduced a Criminal Law Amendment Act (1968-1969) with changes in laws pertaining to hot-button social issues such as homosexuality, contraception and abortion. How progressive he was, you say to yourself (as we all did for a moment in time), but the devil was in the details: “The omnibus bill made abortion legal as long as it was approved by three or more doctors. The bill meant women could only get abortions if their pregnancy was a threat to their life or health and if they received permission in writing from their hospital’s therapeutic abortion committee. A woman’s mental health or economic circumstances were not considered legitimate reasons for the committee to take into account.” (Vancouver Sun, Dec. 17, 2016, page A2).

Abortion counselling ad in Peak

All of which meant that we were on our own, patching together a lousy or lousier “safety net” for the young students who were coming to us because we were older, or wiser, or simply there when no one else was. And what did we have to offer: not much, and most of it either too expensive or too dangerous. There were illegal abortionists working in the area, but we didn’t know who or where and really didn’t think that would be a safe option even if we did know how to find them. There was a legal abortion clinic in Berkeley, California, if you could afford to go there; most could not. A couple of years later, a clinic opened in Renton, just outside of Seattle, which was slightly less expensive. There was one doctor in town whom we did know about, but he charged $300, which was out of reach for most college students at the time, and then he was out of reach: arrested, charged and tried. And then there was a private clinic in wealthy West Vancouver, in which you could relax for a week-long stay, and have all your medical woes attended to, for a mere $1500. No police hassled them. Needless to say, we didn’t recommend that option very often – in fact, not at all.

So, realistically, what could we do? Not much, in the short term – perhaps more, in the long term. We could push the federal government to be more supportive of women and to enact laws that made it possible for us to live useful and productive, even fulfilling, lives. But that would take a big change in the thinking of law-makers and politicians. That would take a campaign creating political pressure on the government to make equal pay for women a reality, pass mandatory fair hiring practices, and particularly in that moment, make abortion more accessible.

Well, we figured we knew how to move on that. So we went to it.

“READ ALL ABOUT IT!!!”

We printed and handed out leaflets on street corners; we hand-stenciled oodles of posters and even had some printed “professionally”. (OK, Pressgang was run by friends of ours who were themselves learning how to use the machinery, but it sure worked for us.) But what worked big-time was our newly established newspaper, “The Pedestal”, which documented the activities we undertook to highlight the importance and the destructiveness that the laws and prejudices around abortion generated for women.

Abortion was one of the issues mentioned in the lead-off article in Fall, 1969: “Why Picket Trudeau?”.1 Our take on Trudeau’s bill: “The ‘new’ abortion laws are a farce – they demand that women suffer the degrading experience of justifying their humaness to an elite group of men, who can never understand the mental pain of unwanted …childbirth. “ The Winter, 1969 edition outlined the beginning of our campaign to change the law to reflect the needs of women regarding abortion. (Winter, 1969, Vol.1, No. 2, Page 1 “Abortion Campaign”). We decided to set up workshops and seminars and weekly clinics to educate women on the effects of the new law, particularly regarding the unavailability of legal abortion.

By February of 1970, the weekly Abortion Information Centre evening clinic was up and running in the Vancouver and District Labour Temple, and there was a lengthy article on the history of abortion through the ages and in different societies in our newspaper. On page 8, a rally in support of the abortion campaign was announced for February 14th, Valentine’s Day, and the first reference to a motor cavalcade to Ottawa appeared. (February, 1970, Vol. 1, Pages 7 & 8 “The Abortion Machine”; “Abortion Campaign”).

March of 1970 brought more demonstrations and confrontations with politicians. Women declared war on Ottawa for withholding needed medical services from us, and promised a march of women on Ottawa (March, 1970, Vol. 2, Page 3 “Hundreds Protest Abortion Laws”).

Closer to home, on March 10, we sent an open letter to Ralph Loffmark, British Columbia’s Health Minister, outlining the major changes to the laws on abortion we felt needed to be changed. On March 25th (as reported in the April Pedestal), three groups of women disrupted the working of the provincial legislature in Victoria with red tape flung over the gallery on the Social Credit side, and banners demanding access to abortion. The face-to-face meeting which then ensued was indicative of Loffmark’s complete lack of understanding about his portfolio. One example: when asked what his understanding of the term “health” meant, he waffled: “It’s up to my Medical Health Officers to determine a person’s health. I don’t have anything to do with it.” We asked him if he was able to define health in general terms at all. He replied that he was not. We asked him what he was doing as Health Minister if he wouldn’t even define health. He didn’t answer that.

In April, 1970, VWC members also confronted local Vancouver doctors when they assembled to have a College of Physicians and Surgeons meeting at the Lawn Tennis Club; the front door was locked against us, but two intrepid members scooted around the back and got in through the kitchen. While we were hooting and hollering in the front, the doctors were being harangued mightily in the dining room. Docs called cops, naturally, and we agreed to leave, on a firm note: “We felt we had the right to present our case. ..but we knew we were not finished fighting the College.” (April, 1970, Vol.2, Pages 1, 2 & 3 “Strangers in the House”; “An Open Letter to Loffmark”; “Women Confront Loffmark”; “Trudeau Passes the Buck”; “Join Cross Canada Abortion Campaign”).

On the Federal front, in our open letter to Prime Minister Trudeau we reminded him that the abortion law brought in by his party killed upwards of 2,000 women a year. There was no response to our letter, not surprisingly. After all, he’d been waylaid by two of our members on the North Shore ski slopes who demanded ABORTION NOW! After a fairly mundane and rhetorical discussion of doctors and laws, Trudeau capped the discussion with: ”If we all would keep picketing, no one would need abortions”, which just shows you what a thoughtful and caring man he was. (April, 1970, Vol.2, Pages 1, 2 & 3 “Strangers in the House”; “An Open Letter to Loffmark”; “Women Confront Loffmark”; “Trudeau Passes the Buck”; “Join Cross Canada Abortion Campaign”)

May of 1970 was a pink four-pager, what with the Abortion Cavalcade headed off to Ottawa, a report on the invasion of the Doctors’ dinner, and a major march/demonstration in Vancouver for Mother’s Day. In Saskatchewan, the new Federal Health Minister, John Munro, was confronted by over a hundred angry women in Saskatoon, who picketed the hotel where he was scheduled to speak. The Minster’s response to the presentation: “I have a lot of responsibilities and this isn’t one of my high priorities at the moment.” It was, however, a high enough priority for the B.C. Federation of Labour to endorse our efforts, and to “urge all affiliated unions to support actively this campaign”. (May, 1970, Vol. 2, All pages “Abortion Cavalcade”; “March on Mother’s Day”; “Munro Agrees to Talk”; “Labour Supports Abortion Campaign”; “Defend Makaroff”).

June 1970 had all the stories about the Abortion Cavalcade. Its success was documented in a centrefold spread describing the warm welcomes the women received in each city as they crossed the country. We reported on their “visit” to Parliament in Ottawa: “…we held an open meeting in the Railway Room of the Parliament Buildings to present a brief to Trudeau, Munro and Turner.” None of the trio was there, just three NDP members (including Grace McInnes) and one Conservative. On the second day, thirty-six women chained themselves to chairs in the public galleries and proceeded to disrupt parliament, the chains making it much more difficult to remove them. As more and more of them got up and starting speaking, it forced an adjournment which closed Parliament for the day. Various views of the success and usefulness of these actions were offered up in The Pedestal: both plus and minus . (June, 1970, Vol. 2, No. 5, Pages 1, 6 & 7 “Parliament Forced To Listen”; “How We Differ”; “These Women Understand the Democratic Procedure”).

The July/August issue featured “The Return of Trudeau”, a meeting in the Hotel Vancouver he asked for and we obliged. He wanted 6-8 women to attend; we provided about 40-50 women, all of them very prepared to tell him what was lacking or just plain wrong in the legislation that he had introduced. We had strategized the night before, figured out a reasoned approach to the meeting, and went at it politely but strongly. He tried passing the buck (and the blame) to the doctors; we countered with the obvious : that doctors who did abortions were being charged and jailed. We brought up the fact that women with enough money could obtain abortions; he saw nothing contradictory or unjust about that. As he not so helpfully pointed out: “You are saying that the law doesn’t fall equally on the poor and on the rich. But this is true – it doesn’t just apply to abortion laws.” Presumably that made it unsurprising, commonplace and nothing to worry about. So much for Mr. Trudeau’s “Just Society”. (July/August, 1970, Vol. 2, #6, Page 1 “The Return of Trudeau”).

During most of 1971, we continued to hold weekly counselling sessions to discuss access to abortion, but by October, the focus on just that one issue had changed, and the discussions became more general. Still, in February of 1972, we marched again for Free Abortion on Demand – the issue that for women just never went away.

Ironically, it was a man who pushed the issue back into the headlines. Dr. Henry Morgentaler challenged the anti-abortion laws across Canada and faced several trials for doing something that was patently illegal. Three jury trials: three acquittals. In each case, the jury decided that the law was unfair and that the rights of women to control their own bodies took precedence over legal rules that reflected the morality of an earlier era. At the Supreme Court level, the jury acquittals were reversed and new trials were ordered. However, with the establishment of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms in 1984, the Supreme Court of Canada struck down the abortion law on procedural grounds. Justice Bertha Wilson, the first woman to sit on the Supreme Court, added a minority opinion: “The right to reproduce or not to reproduce…is properly perceived as an integral part of modern women’s struggle to assert her dignity and worth as a human being.” (“The Massey Murder”, by Charlotte Gray, HarperCollins Publishers, 2013, p. 284).

Related materials

The Birth Control Handbook – 1968

In Montreal, Canada, a group of teenage students publicly violated the law to publish a text providing critical information about sexual health and contraception. Thousands of copies of the handbook sold throughout the world.