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Workers Vanguard No. 1029
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6 September 2013
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Dr. Henry Morgentaler, 1923-2013-Heroic Fighter for Abortion Rights
The following article originally appeared in Spartacist
Canada No. 178 (Fall 2013), newspaper of our comrades of the Trotskyist
League/Ligue Trotskyste.
Dr. Henry Morgentaler died in Toronto on May 29 at the age of 90.
For more than 40 years, he was at the centre of the struggle for abortion rights
in Canada. A tenacious fighter and a humane and compassionate man, he repeatedly
risked his freedom, security and even his life in this struggle. In the early
1970s he was subjected to six years of trials despite three jury acquittals, and
spent ten months in prison, suffering a heart attack after being thrown into
solitary confinement. In 1983, police raided his clinics and he was again
dragged through the courts for defying Canada’s reactionary abortion laws.
Again, no jury would convict him.
Morgentaler’s greatest legal victory was in the Supreme Court of
Canada in 1988. As a result, Canada today has no laws restricting abortion
rights. Yet a patchwork of obstacles and regulations, including too few doctors
and inadequate medical facilities, mean that many women lack access to this
medical procedure. Morgentaler himself fought for 20 years against
obstructionist provincial governments that refused to fund abortions or tried to
bar him from setting up clinics. In New Brunswick, a woman needs the consent of
two doctors for a publicly funded abortion. In Prince Edward Island, one cannot
get an abortion at all. In Yukon and Nunavut, abortions are not performed after
12 weeks, hitting Native women harshly.
Morgentaler performed tens of thousands of abortions, and many of
his patients sought to express their gratitude, for he had quite literally saved
their lives. But his defiance of Canada’s abortion laws also tapped into a
seemingly bottomless well of anti-woman bigotry, often laced with anti-Semitism.
Abortion is socially explosive because, in giving women control over their
fertility, it undermines the institution of the family, a key instrument for the
oppression of women. Thus the right to free abortion on demand is inseparable
from the broader struggle for the emancipation of women.
From the Lodz Ghetto to the Auschwitz Death Camp
Henry Morgentaler’s story began in Lodz, Poland where he was born
in 1923, the son of ardent Jewish socialists. Poland was (and remains)
overwhelmingly Catholic. Its deeply rooted anti-Semitism exploded in the mid
1930s as Jewish businesses were boycotted and Jews were barred from jobs in the
civil service, in public schools and many other places. A wave of pogromist
violence between 1935 and 1939 was instigated by reactionary political parties,
the clergy, landowners, the intelligentsia and the bourgeoisie, leaving many
hundreds dead and well over 1,000 injured. As Morgentaler told his biographer
Eleanor Wright Pelrine:
“Jews were the Christ killers, and Poles were vicious and virulent
in their anti-Semitism, largely on a religious basis. There were other factors,
of course. Jews were used as scapegoats; they were resented for their presumed
economic power and almost everything else. An anti-Semite could use any argument
he liked. There was a large Jewish proletariat, a lot of poor Jews in Poland,
and on the one hand the anti-Semites damned Jews as the big capitalists, and on
the other as revolutionaries trying to overthrow the system.”
— Morgentaler: The Doctor Who Couldn’t Turn Away (1975)
Henry’s father Josef was a well-known and respected trade unionist
and member of the Jewish Socialist Labour Bund. An early target for the Nazi
stormtroopers, Josef Morgentaler was arrested and tortured just weeks after the
1 September 1939 German invasion of Poland. He died in a concentration camp at
the hands of the Nazis. Jews in the Lodz ghetto, which included Henry, his
brother Mumek (Mike) and mother Golda, endured starvation and forced labour.
When the Nazis liquidated the ghetto in 1944, the Morgentalers were shipped to
Auschwitz along with many others. Near the end of the war, the brothers were
sent to Dachau. Against all odds, they survived.
Postwar Canada and Social Struggles in Quebec
After the war, Henry made his way to Belgium where he studied
medicine. However, he could not practice there, and he and his wife Eva, also a
survivor of the death camps, managed to get to Canada in early 1950.
Anti-Semitism was endemic in the Canadian ruling class. Liberal prime minister
Mackenzie King had effusively praised Adolf Hitler in 1937 and his government
slammed the doors to desperate Jews fleeing the Nazi Holocaust. Between 1933 and
1945, Canada took in fewer Jewish refugees than any other imperialist power: not
even 5,000.
This was one of many crimes committed by the imperialists during
World War II, which was no “war for democracy” but, at bottom, an
interimperialist conflict for global political and economic domination. While
sharply opposing all the imperialist combatants, Trotskyists stood for the
unconditional military defense of the Soviet Union which, despite its Stalinist
degeneration, remained a workers state where capitalist and landlord
exploitation had been overthrown in the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution. After the
war, like their American and British senior partners, the Canadian rulers
welcomed with open arms thousands of Nazi war criminals as “freedom fighters” in
the imperialists’ crusade to destroy the Soviet Union.
After settling in Montreal, Morgentaler was denied entry to the
English-language McGill University which, like many Canadian universities, had
quotas limiting the admittance of Jews. Instead, he completed his medical
studies at the francophone Université de Montréal and in 1955 established a
practice in the city’s working-class, French-speaking east end.
Quebec at that time was still very much in the grip of the Catholic
church; the oppression of women was profound. Divorce was prohibited, and until
1964 married women were legally deemed to lack the “capacity” even to sign
contracts. The society was shaped by the national oppression of the
French-speaking Québécois nation by the British-derived bourgeoisie, which
worked in league with the Catholic hierarchy.
The 1960s and early ’70s saw tumultuous social upheaval in Quebec,
including in the francophone working class, whose struggles were fuelled in
large part by opposition to national oppression. The dominance of the Catholic
church was broken. Among other things, birth rates plummeted from one of the
highest in the world to one of the lowest. It was amid this turmoil that Henry
Morgentaler entered the political arena as a secular humanist fighting against
the confessional school system. Alongside the Mouvement Laïque de Langue
Française, he launched the Committee for Neutral Schools.
At this time, abortion and all forms of contraception were illegal
and Canada’s laws were among the strictest in the world. Maria Corsillo, who
helped found and today manages the Scott abortion clinic in Toronto, recalls the
period vividly:
“I was a seven-year-old immigrant and I used to go with women to
the doctor and translate for them. ‘Tell him I can’t have another,’ they’d say
to me, and the doctor would always respond, ‘There’s nothing I can do’.”
—Now [Toronto], 6-13 June
By now a prominent and outspoken crusader for abortion rights, in
1967 Morgentaler addressed a parliamentary hearing calling for the legalization
of abortion. He was soon besieged by desperate women pleading for abortions and
in January 1968 he consciously defied the law and performed his first abortion.
In 1969, the federal Liberal government of Pierre Trudeau decriminalized
contraception and somewhat eased the laws against abortion while keeping it in
the Criminal Code. Now, to obtain an abortion, women had to win the approval of
a panel of three doctors, the degrading “therapeutic abortion committee.”
That same year, Morgentaler closed his family practice to devote
himself to providing abortions. “I decided to break the law to provide a
necessary medical service because women were dying at the hands of butchers and
incompetent quacks, and there was no one there to help them,” he told another
biographer, Catherine Dunphy. “The law was barbarous, cruel and unjust. I had
been in a concentration camp, and I knew what suffering was. If I can ease
suffering, I feel perfectly justified in doing so” (cited in New York
Times, 29 May). He quickly became renowned for his empathy and skill. He
pioneered new and safer abortion techniques, and over the years trained hundreds
of doctors to perform the procedure.
Dr. Morgentaler was first charged under the new abortion law in
1970, and thus began the succession of trials and acquittals that dominated his
life and the fight for abortion rights for the next two decades. He was
acquitted three times by largely working-class francophone Québécois juries. In
a legally unprecedented move, the Quebec Court of Appeal overturned his 1974
acquittal and sentenced him to 18 months in jail. He served ten months and was
finally freed in early 1976.
Cold War II and the War on Women
In the early 1980s, access to abortion throughout Canada became
even worse. In Toronto the need was desperate. In 1981, Women’s College Hospital
performed just three abortions per week, while Toronto General, which received
some 75 requests per day, did six per week, but only on Thursdays.
Fewer and fewer hospitals even had the wretched therapeutic abortion committees.
Morgentaler returned to the battle, and in 1983 opened clinics in Winnipeg and
Toronto.
The backlash was swift and violent. In both cities, police staged
jackboot raids on his clinics. The then-ruling Manitoba New Democratic Party was
in the forefront of this persecution. The NDP’s attorney general, Roland Penner,
vowed to prosecute any violations of the reactionary abortion laws, and he did.
Morgentaler later spoke of his naiveté in believing that “since the NDP has a
platform supporting freedom of choice, they would refrain from prosecution.” A
few months later, when we interviewed Dr. Morgentaler for Women and
Revolution, he told us:
“And the Winnipeg police raided the clinic twice, twice when
operations were being done. They really were quasi-fascist acts. Somewhat like a
police state—you know? It’s never happened before anywhere and I think that the
prosecution in Winnipeg is probably one of the most vicious that I’ve ever
seen.”
— “‘Pro-Life’ Gestapo Raids Abortion Clinics,” W&R No.
27 (Winter 1983-84)
State repression fuelled anti-woman violence and vile
anti-Semitism. In 1983, a man armed with garden shears attacked Morgentaler
outside his Toronto clinic. Soon after, arsonists tried to destroy the clinic
and it was continually besieged by mobs backed by the Catholic church. These
“pro-life” fanatics were the shock troops in the bourgeoisie’s war on women,
part and parcel of the then escalating war on “godless communism,” which sought
to roll back every working-class gain from the Russian Revolution to trade
unions. This was the reactionary climate of the renewed Cold War offensive
against the Soviet Union, which despite its Stalinist degeneration stood as a
roadblock to the imperialists’ drive to reconquer the entire globe for
capitalist exploitation.
Throughout the 1980s, the Trotskyist League stood out for our
defense of the Soviet Union and the bureaucratically deformed workers states of
East Europe. For this, we were frequently attacked and excluded from protests,
including International Women’s Day demonstrations, by reformist leftists,
feminists and their often male enforcers. The “pro-choice” reformists and
feminists lined up behind the imperialist drive against the USSR, thereby
trampling on women’s rights. In 1978-79, when a modernizing, Soviet-allied
government in Afghanistan moved to implement modest reforms for women such as
lowering the bride price and instituting education, tribalist Islamic
reactionaries backed by the CIA erupted in violence and terror. When the Soviet
Union sent its Red Army into Afghanistan in late 1979 at the invitation of the
left-nationalist government, the reformist left internationally echoed the
imperialist hue and cry against this.
Poland was a particular flashpoint. When the oppositional
Solidarność movement emerged in 1980, the feminists, along with much of the
left, the NDP and the labour bureaucracy, hailed this clerical-nationalist
outfit, which was also promoted by the Pope and the CIA. After it consolidated
around an openly reactionary program for capitalist counterrevolution a year
later, we raised the call to “Stop Solidarność counterrevolution!” even as we
denounced the many crimes of the ruling Stalinist bureaucracy. After Solidarność
came to power in 1989, capitalism was restored. In 1993 it made virtually all
abortions illegal.
The feminists who organized the abortion rights campaigns of the
1970s and ’80s generally supported the social-democratic NDP. Many were also
supporters of ostensibly socialist groups which, in true reformist fashion,
tailored their demands to be acceptable to bourgeois liberals. As feminists,
they drew the sex line rather than the class line, framing their campaigns
around single-issue calls such as “repeal the abortion laws,” later reduced to
“choice.” But neither of these slogans begins to address the needs of poor,
immigrant and Native women who need free and unrestricted access to abortion.
The wealthy will always be able to get medical care, including abortions.
Indeed, more than once during his legal trials, Morgentaler noted that his
patients included the wives, sisters and daughters of the same politicians and
judges that were leading the prosecution against him.
The local Toronto abortion rights coalition made its stance all too
clear in 1977, when it voted down the demand for “Free abortion on demand” put
forward by a representative of the Immigrant Women’s Centre. The latter withdrew
from the coalition, which was so obviously stacked against poor and minority
women. The Trotskyist League has always fought for free abortion on demand, for
free, quality health care for all and free 24-hour childcare, part of our
broader struggle for women’s liberation through socialist revolution.
Murderous War on Abortion Rights
In 1984, Dr. Morgentaler and Drs. Robert Scott and Leslie Smoling
were acquitted of charges laid in Toronto the year before, a major victory in a
trial in which the crown attorney equated Morgentaler, an Auschwitz survivor,
with Hitler. The judge all but ordered the jury to convict. As we wrote in “All
Honor to Dr. Morgentaler!” (Spartacist Canada No. 62, November 1984),
“Even by standards of bourgeois ‘justice’ the trial was stacked against the
doctors, and aimed at whipping up an anti-abortion frenzy.” Outrageously, the
Ontario attorney general appealed, and yet another jury acquittal was set aside
and a new trial ordered. Morgentaler in turn appealed to the federal Supreme
Court. No friend of women’s rights, the court evidently saw that putting
Morgentaler behind bars was a losing battle and accordingly determined that the
abortion laws were unconstitutional.
The anti-woman bigots quickly launched a counteroffensive. As in
the U.S., the violence of the 1980s gave way to the even more murderous and open
terror against abortion providers of the 1990s. Morgentaler’s Toronto clinic was
firebombed and destroyed in 1992. Eight doctors have been murdered in the U.S.
since 1977 and there have been many more attempted murders. In Canada in 1994,
Dr. Garson Romalis barely survived gunshot wounds; in 2000 he was again injured
by an anti-abortion would-be murderer. In the 1990s, two other Canadian abortion
providers, Drs. Hugh Short and Jack Fainman, were shot and injured.
The anti-abortion forces want to bring back the days when abortion
was illegal and untold numbers of women were butchered or mutilated by
back-alley or self-induced abortions. Although abortion continues to be legal,
the steady drumbeat of anti-abortion reaction has recently become louder.
Largely hidden from view is the continued threat of violence against abortion
providers.
Conservative [Party] prime minister Stephen Harper’s hard-right
coterie—including his cabinet—is full of religious “end-of-days” revivalists who
are vicious opponents of abortion, gay rights, women’s rights, evolution and
much else. His tenure has greatly increased the influence of Christian
fundamentalists in Ottawa. Recent years have seen a flurry of reactionary bills
introduced by anti-abortion MPs [Members of Parliament]. One would have made
killing a fetus a separate offence when a pregnant woman was murdered. Another
sought to create a parliamentary committee to debate when human life begins.
More recently, three Tory MPs demanded that the RCMP [Royal Canadian Mounted
Police] investigate hundreds of abortions as “homicides,” while anti-abortion
bigots have started campaigning against “sex-selective” abortions as a wedge to
roll back abortion rights.
The attacks on abortion rights are heavily conditioned by the level
of class struggle. The working class has the social power necessary to mobilize
in defense of women’s rights and those of all the oppressed. Many Canadian
unions support abortion rights. But the union movement has been on the defensive
for many years, and the gains won through past struggles are being rolled back
everywhere by a ruling class bent on ensuring that the working class pays for
the economic crisis of the capitalist system. The leaders of the unions aim to
contain working-class struggle within the bounds of capitalism.
Capitalism and Women’s Liberation
Shaped by the torment of the Holocaust, Henry Morgentaler was
driven, in his own words, “to feel vibrant, enjoying life, and to become a full
person. To be open to experience—active and useful.... Active, as a sort of
mover of history, doing something useful and important.” This powerful impulse
led him to believe that “under some circumstances, it is imperative to defy
authority” (Morgentaler: The Doctor Who Couldn’t Turn Away). He was an
exuberant and talented man who spoke Polish, Yiddish, French and English, and
could soothe a patient in almost any language. He loved women, had many affairs
and was married three times. He never really stopped fighting on behalf of women
and their rights.
An atheist, Morgentaler found in secular humanism a worldview that
satisfied him. He was not a Marxist, but he agreed to be interviewed for our
Marxist journal Women and Revolution in 1983. His interests in fighting
on behalf of the oppressed went well beyond the question of abortion rights. A
decade after the W&R interview, he joined other prominent
intellectuals internationally in saluting a successful anti-Nazi action carried
out by our German comrades, writing: “As a survivor of the Nazi Holocaust I
commend the supporters of the Spartakist Workers Party and the Committee for
Social Defense for removing the swastika flag near the Brandenburg Gate” (see
Spartacist Canada No. 91, Spring 1993).
Henry Morgentaler’s personal and political history testifies to the
fact that abortion is not a narrow “women’s issue.” Indeed, it is a
class issue: an essential democratic right, the removal of which
would redound against all working people. The status of women is
inextricably linked to that of the working class, which is uniquely situated to
bring capitalist rule, the basis for women’s oppression today, to an end. The
liberation of women requires a socialist revolution that will uproot the private
property system and create a worldwide socialized planned economy. Only then
will society be able to replace the institution of the family with socialized
childcare and housework, bringing women into full participation in all areas of
social and political life.
This perspective requires the forging of a revolutionary vanguard
party, entailing a struggle in the working class to break the hold of the
social-democratic NDP, which is committed to upholding the rule of capital.
Understanding that the interests of the capitalists and the workers are
counterposed, such a party would intervene into social struggle as the most
historically conscious and advanced element of the proletariat. It would defend
the rights of minorities and Native people. It would advocate Quebec
independence to oppose the dominant Anglo chauvinism and get the national
question off the agenda. It would champion free abortion on demand, fighting for
the program of women’s liberation through socialist revolution. This is the
perspective fought for by the Trotskyist League/Ligue trotskyste, and it is in
this spirit that we say: All honour to Dr. Morgentaler!
