Dr. Henry Morgentaler

Dr. Henry Morgentaler (1923-2013):

This survey of Canadian Jews and crime/espionage will conclude with a person who repeatedly and demonstratively broke the law prohibiting abortion, with a permanent impact on Canadian law and practice on this vexed issue.

Morgentaler was born in Łódź, Poland, to Jewish socialist, union-organizing parents (members of the General Jewish Labour Bund). He was deported to Auschwitz in 1944, where his parents and sister were murdered, and later transferred to Dachau. After the War, he finished medical school prerequisites in Germany and Belgium before moving to Canada in 1950. He earned his medical degree from the Université de Montréal in 1953.

Having survived the Holocaust, Morgentaler developed an intense, lifelong aversion to state control over individual bodies. He viewed the Canadian government's criminalization of abortion as a form of state-sanctioned cruelty that forced women into dangerous back-alley procedures. Having witnessed the ultimate breakdown of legal morality under the Nazi regime, he believed it was his ethical duty as a physician to actively break unjust laws to save human lives. To cope with his survivor’s guilt, he felt a fierce obligation to make his survival "meaningful" by actively protecting others. In his view, providing safe reproductive healthcare was a tangible way to preserve the health, dignity, and lives of living women, thereby paying a debt to the lives lost in the camps. His secular Jewish humanism heavily influenced his definition of life. While his anti-abortion detractors focused on the sanctity of the fetus, Morgentaler’s ethics prioritized the conscious, suffering human beings already here—the women who were dying from botched illegal abortions.

Morgentaler systematically used civil disobedience to dismantle restrictive Canadian laws. In 1969, Canada allowed abortions only if approved by a Therapeutic Abortion Committee at an accredited hospital. Access was highly unequal and slow. Morgentaler opened illegal clinics to offer safe services. He was arrested multiple times. Quebec juries repeatedly acquitted him, refusing to convict a doctor providing safe medical care.

In 1974, an appeals court overturned a jury acquittal and jailed him. This prompted the federal "Morgentaler Amendment," preventing appeal courts from replacing jury acquittals with convictions. His legal battle culminated in the landmark Supreme Court of Canada case R. v. Morgentaler (1988). The Court struck down Canada's abortion law as unconstitutional, ruling that restricting access violated a woman's right to "life, liberty and security of the person" under the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms.

Because the 1988 ruling struck down the old law and no new law replaced it, Canada became—and remains—one of the few nations with no criminal laws governing abortion. It is treated purely as a medical procedure. Morgentaler opened 20 independent clinics nationwide, securing access outside hospitals.

He was the first doctor in North America to use vacuum aspiration, making abortions faster and significantly safer than old scraping methods. He personally trained over 100 doctors in safe abortion techniques, establishing standards of practice for reproductive healthcare. Early in his practice, he was an isolated pioneer providing vasectomies, intrauterine devices (IUDs), and birth control pills to unmarried women. For his immense, country-altering activism, he was appointed to the Order of Canada in 2008. – Google/AI

Morgentaler, Henry, (Abortion and Contraception [hc, Beaufort Books, 1982]) 978-0825300936 [Morgentaler’s own written manifesto and medical defense, published just a few years before his final Supreme Court victory. It outlines his philosophy on reproductive freedom and the medical necessity of safe access.]

Dunphy, Catherine, (Morgentaler: A Difficult Hero [hc, Random House Canada, 1996] 978-0394223919 [pb, Wiley, 2003] 978-0470833568 [Dunphy is sympathetic to the importance of what he accomplished but decidedly not hagiographic: she deals with his ego, difficult personal relationships, womanizing, combativeness, Holocaust experience, medical career, and almost obsessive willingness to fight the abortion laws. It is also very good on the successive trials.

Stettner, Shannon, Kristin Burnett, and Travis Hay, eds., (Abortion: History, Politics, and Reproductive Justice After Morgentaler [hc, U. of British Columbia Press, 2017] 978-0774835732 [pb, UBC Press, 2018] 978-0774835749 [A multidisciplinary anthology evaluating the broader sociopolitical impact of the ruling, moving the conversation beyond legal definitions of "choice" to real-world medical accessibility.]