How to best protect a woman's right to choose in Canada

The narratives that overturned Roe v Wade in the United States are circulating in Canada and we need to have a serious conversation about how to preserve Canadian abortion rights. To help understand how to do this, I interviewed Dr. Michelle Cohen, a family doctor and an articulate, big-picture thinker on abortion rights in Canada. “Abortion is decriminalized in Canada and is considered within the scope of healthcare,” said Dr. Cohen. “It’s a medical procedure and, like any other medical procedure you might obtain from a doctor, it’s regulated by professional standards. “There are a lot of pro-choice advocates who are watching what is happening in the U.S. now and saying, ‘We need protection—we need a law.’ But there’s a problem with removing it from healthcare and turning it into something else. Read: What I learned at my mother's knee before, during and after abortion reform “Abortion should stay as a medical procedure that’s governed by the professional standards that already exist, because abortion is an extremely safe procedure in Canada. Since we have a safe procedure, people do well with it, so why do we need to do anything else with it? “Also, removing it from the healthcare domain and putting it into the legal domain means we will have a bunch of often ill-informed politicians, who are only familiar with only bullet talking points, arguing about abortion in Parliament. If it switches to a party that decides that the wind is blowing against abortion, or they are influenced by anti-choice American politics and the American lobbyists who are working with anti-choice Canadian lobbyists, the next thing you know politicians are changing the laws. Putting things in the legal domain is not protecting it— it’s making it vulnerable to have politicians turning it into a political football. “Ultimately abortion is healthcare. It is not a political football. It is a health procedure and provided for women who need it for health reasons. What if politicians, even with the procedure strictly in the medical rather than legal domain, try to restrict abortions? Dr. Cohen agrees this is a risk. “It’s a possibility that a government can put restrictions on abortion and we should be extremely cautious about anti-choice propaganda we are seeing in some politicians. We have to be extremely vigilant.” What exactly should we be vigilant about? Here, Dr. Cohen paints a clear picture of the multiple and powerful forces at play that could change safe access to abortion in Canada. “The anti-abortion advocates are creating a fantasy about abortion,” she said. “They work really hard to breathe life into this fiction. “The fantasy is a woman who, very late in her pregnancy, decides to abort for reasons of convenience driven by heartless disregard for the life she is carrying. “This has racist undertones. Classist undertones.” Dr. Cohen accurately depicts these arguments as bigoted because any form of bigotry—and people pick their own bigotry whether it be race, class, religion or any other thing that comes to mind—involves the framing of someone as the ‘other’: they are different than you, the people you know and love, and are an easy place to place all negative characterizations without any empathy, because this is a fictional person. So what does this ‘other’ person who gets late-term abortions look like? “She’s a woman who gets abortions over and over again, who couldn’t bother getting condoms and is using abortion as birth control because she doesn’t feel like being pregnant anymore,” said Dr. Cohen. “This is to get support from people who then say, ‘Who is this woman getting abortions? The person who couldn’t bother getting condoms and is using abortion as birth control; they’re not paying attention; they want unfettered access, so we need a law to restrict what is happening because it's unethical.’ But if you dig in, they are looking to restrict all abortion access.” If this is the fantasy—and it’s a powerful one—what is the reality? “It’s generally hard to obtain an abortion in Canada after 20 weeks so, ironically, most of the women end up going to the U.S.. I don’t know what will happen now. Any abortion over 20 weeks is a surgical procedures and many hospitals in Canada are limited in what procedures they provide past 20 weeks. “Late-term abortions are done where the pregnancy is not viable when anomalies are detected that are incompatible with life or the mother’s life is in jeopardy. It’s an act of mercy. “It’s a tragic story where there’s a very much wanted pregnancy that just can’t happen, or that there are unanticipated health risks. We know that a large number of these women are already parents and are trying to protect the children they have—because parents worry about their kids’ health, but also need to look after their health. That’s pretty universal. You think, ‘I have to look after my health because I need to be here for my kids because they need me.’ That is the reality of a late term abortion. It’s a tragic situation that nobody asked for. “We should be supportive of people who go through this tragic situation. They need support, they don’t need to be turned into some propagandistic fantasy, with racist overtones . . . of a woman who doesn’t care.” The fiction presented by anti-choice advocates is, “making a cruel mockery of these situations that are quite tragic and for a political purpose. It’s quite awful.” Interestingly, Dr. Cohen points out that the media narratives in Canada are also helping the anti-choice advocates. “The media likes to gaslight concerns with ‘everything is ok.’ We saw in the U.S. many pundits said the same thing, and look where they are. I wasn’t listening to that nonsense before and I’m certainly not going to listening to it now. There’s absolutely a possibility that abortion can be restricted in Canada.” Read: We've got to get on top of long COVID before it drowns us Dr. Cohen has given us a roadmap to protect abortion access in Canada: keep it as a healthcare decision between a woman and her doctor. Don’t let yourself be fooled by false narratives about the late-term abortions that antichoice advocates are targeting first, before they try to restrict all abortions. Remember why women get abortions and, very importantly, don’t let yourself be drawn into seeing women who get abortions as the ‘other.’ See them as you do the women you know, you care about and are human in every way. Finally, don’t allow yourself to be lulled into a false sense of confidence: vote carefully because women’s rights are on the ballot in every provincial and federal election. Dr. Mary Fernando is a physician in Ottawa. Find her on Twitter @MaryFernando_.

How to best protect a woman's right to choose in Canada

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