dragonlady7

disobedience, canadian politics

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Opinion | Why I violated Texas’s extreme abortion ban https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/09/18/texas-abortion-provider-alan-braid/:

antoine-roquentin https://antoine-roquentin.tumblr.com/post/662827997887332352/opinion-why-i-violated-texass-extreme-abortion :

For me, it is 1972 all over again.

And that is why, on the morning of Sept. 6, I provided an abortion to a woman who, though still in her first trimester, was beyond the state’s new limit. I acted because I had a duty of care to this patient, as I do for all patients, and because she has a fundamental right to receive this care.

I fully understood that there could be legal consequences — but I wanted to make sure that Texas didn’t get away with its bid to prevent this blatantly unconstitutional law from being tested.

i’m sure a lot of people don’t understand how abortion became accessible in canada. much of it is due to one guy, henry morgentaler, a holocaust survivor who came to specialize in family planning medicine in montreal. in 1967, there was a desire to update the 19th century laws on abortion, so morgentaler testified in favour of legalization. women saw this and started asking him for under the table abortions, and he was eventually moved by the sheer amount of horror stories he saw to start performing these in a private clinic. when the trudeau government updated the law in 1969, it failed to increase accessibility for all but the very wealthy, so morgentaler continued to practice in violation of the law.

eventually, the quebec government arrested and tried him. they set him up in front of a jury of working class montreal catholics, confident that they’d have success in villainizing a jewish abortionist. instead, swayed by the passionate testimony of women who’d received abortions, the jury nullified. shockingly, the judges on the quebec appeals court overruled the jury’s acquittal, something virtually unheard of in a common law system. the outcry was so great that the trudeau government was forced to change the law, vacating morgentaler’s conviction and letting him go free from prison. from the moment he was released, morgentaler continued his practice in violation of the law. he was also acquitted every time he was subsequently charged. he even went so far as to open up clinics in other provinces and train students to do the same. eventually, provinces had to stop prosecuting him because of the cost, and the supreme court ultimately struck the law down.

this sort of civil disobedience is the obvious route against the texas law. abortion rights groups in america are extremely well funded and could ensure a steady stream of clinics operating in that state. however, most donors to these groups are very rich. civil disobedience tends to make people realize that if one unjust law can be fought by ignoring it, so can all others. rich donors don’t want people to get used to this because the donors would probably be next in line, so they restrict the fight to the arena of the judicial system, where it’s bound to lose to a conservative majority. (Your picture was not posted)