Never again

A Post a Day in May 4/31

The stickers were red with white writing. We stuck them anywhere we could think of, including the inside door of the women’s washrooms on campus. It was a primitive, but effective, way to reach women and to share important information about access to abortion.

This was 1987 in Halifax, Nova Scotia. The Supreme Court of Canada had not yet ruled in the Morgentaler Case (that would come the following year), and women needed our efforts to help them get information about how and where to access abortion in the province. Back then, abortion in Canada was covered under Section 251 of the Criminal Code; to secure the procedure, women needed the approval of a Therapeutic Abortion Committee, composed of three doctors.

Long before the advent of the internet or email, contact between women about abortion services was rudimentary. In Halifax, the local CARAL (Canadian Abortion Rights Action League) chapter set up the AIRS line — the Abortion Information Referral Service — to provide information about how and where to access services. The AIRS line was, literally, a rotary-dial phone that Jane W had installed in her front hall closet. It had an answering machine that, somehow, we volunteers could access remotely. We took turns retrieving the messages and returning the calls with the information requested by the caller — usually a young woman, desperate in the face of an unplanned and unwanted pregnancy.

One time, when it was my turn to do the call-backs, I could not get the young woman herself on the line; her dad picked up my call. Well, I wasn’t about to give him my message, so I kept calling back. I don’t remember the outcome, but I really hope I was able, eventually, to speak with the young woman. What I do recall is the fraughtness of it all: so much hanging in the balance, so few options, and so little time to make the right connections.

On January 28, 1988, Canada’s Supreme Court struck down Section 251 of the Criminal Code. In 1991, Brian Mulroney’s Conservative government attempted to re-criminalize abortion, but the bill died in the Senate.

We are a long way from true reproductive justice in this country, but I have seen progress towards it in my lifetime. However, as we can see by what is unfolding in the United States with the leaked Supreme Court judgement (final ruling to come in June) that progress rests on a razor’s edge of political gamesmanship.

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Land acknowledgement: I respectfully recognize that I live on the original lands of Anishinaabe, Cree, Oji-Cree, Dakota and Dene peoples, and on the homeland of the Métis Nation.