bonus features: "bravo for the women of canada"

This post offers supplementary material for a recent Torontoist article, which you should read first before diving into this post.

Cartoon by Andy Donato, the Toronto Sun, January 30, 1988.

One of the pleasant surprises I discovered while researching this story was that all of Toronto’s major newspapers agreed that the Supreme Court of Canada made the right decision to kill the existing federal abortion law. There were notes of caution (the Sun’s editorial strongly recommended counselling on alternatives and birth control, while the Star suggested some controls would be necessary), but they weren’t accompanied by troglodytic language.

I was impressed by the Sun’s coverage—it was very even-handed, to the extent of a point/counterpoint piece where representatives from pro-choice and anti-abortion groups were given space to state their views side-by-side. There was one exception, and it’s a doozy.

Tough-talking, uber-conservative columnist Bob MacDonald felt his readers could “say goodbye to Canada as we know it today.” Yet the main concern in his January 29, 1988 column wasn’t the pro- and anti-choice divide, but the effect more abortions would have on the ethnic makeup of the country. MacDonald believed a lower Canadian birthrate would stimulate a larger demand for immigrants, and that “pressure will build to accept most phony refugee claimants.” And those immigrants wouldn’t be from traditional European sources: “Yesterday’s decision can only add to this already revolutionary change in Canada’s cultural, racial, and religious mix."

This must have made xenophobic readers feel better.

Actually, they were already out in force. MacDonald quoted a caller to the Sun who wondered why Morgentaler didn’t set up shop in India, where more money could be made curbing runaway population growth.

Cue a jaw drop heard across the basement newspaper room of the Toronto Reference Library.

Much classier was Sun colleague Douglas Fisher, who reflected on the history of federal abortion debates and laws in his January 31, 1988 column. Fisher recalled that when he was a federal CCF MP in the late 1950s he made passing references to abortion and illegal birth control information during a speech in the House. Veteran Liberal MP Paul Martin Sr. advised him afterwards to never mention those subjects again. “Nothing could get me in more trouble,” Fisher reflected. “His emphasis was: Leave ‘religious’ subjects alone.” Fisher checked Hansard from the 1960s and could not find a solid reference to abortion until April 1967 when somebody suggested they should be legalized (which happened three years later).

When it came to Henry Morgentaler, Fisher observed that “whether one cherishes or detests him, he is a brave citizen.” 

It’s often weird to see writers you associate with a particular paper show up in another. Such is the case with Michele Landsberg. I think of her as a Star columnist, but she had a stint with the Globe and Mail in the late 1980s, and it was there she commented on the Supreme Court. Here are her personal thoughts on Morgenthaler from her January 30, 1988 column:

Henry Morgentaler is an important hero of mine. He may come across as irascible or abrasive, words that reporters have used about him, but whenever I’ve spoken to him, he’s been gentle, rational and idealistic. In private conversation he would brush off the personal hurts; his anger was saved for the stupidity and inequality of the laws. A small man with a stereotypical Jewish face, a survivor of Auschwitz, he’s had to live with constant ridicule and anti-Semitic vilification from the more extreme of his opponents. He’s been dragged to court over and over again, thrown in jail (just imagine what jail is like to a Holocaust survivor), harassed and threatened beyond most mortals’ endurance. A doctor who could have become smugly affluent in quiet private practice, he repeatedly risked everything to confront an unjust law.