Regardless of where individual Canadians stand on the issue of abortion, anyone who treasures the ascendance of individual rights in Canada has to pay tribute to the influence of Henry Morgentaler.
Morgentaler's death this week at the age of 90 has been both celebrated and mourned across Canada. When it comes to the last 50 years of the 20th century, no Canadian divided the country more than Morgantaler because no issue divides Canadians the way abortion does.
But Morgentaler's legacy actually looms much larger than his specific efforts to legalize abortion, which he accomplished in 1988 when the Supreme Court struck down the federal abortion law as unconstitutional.
For Morgentaler, abortion was merely the lightning rod on the much bigger issue of social norms versus individual rights. From that standpoint, Morgentaler's timing couldn't have been any better. He began performing illegal abortions just as many Canadians began accepting the premise that "the government doesn't belong in the bedrooms of the nation," as articulated by Trudeau when he was still justice minister.
Canadians pushed that notion further, arguing that the government has no place in any citizen's personal affairs, so long as those affairs aren't illegal and don't threaten the safety or well-being of themselves or other citizens.
When they collide today, individuals rights now prevail over community standards or morals, both in society and in the courts.
Forty years ago, taking individual rights to this level was still a radical concept, particularly in Quebec, where the effects of the Quiet Revolution were filtering down into everyday life. Reverence towards social institutions, customs and traditions was still important, especially in public.
The Quebec legislature held a moment of silence out of respect for Morgentaler this week, a shocking turnaround because Premier Pauline Marois and most of the other provincial legislators certainly have memories of a time when Morgentaler was despised for the threat he posed from English Canada to Quebec's conservative Catholic traditions and morals. That moment of silence further illustrates how much modern Quebec has rejected its Catholic roots for a secular modernism, where the defiance of a passionate individual desperate to change society is seen as a blessing, not a curse.
Morgentaler, scarred by his survival of the Holocaust, refused to accept any government having control of decisions as personal as whether a pregnant woman should keep or terminate the fetus growing inside her. For Morgentaler and other supporters of abortion rights, then and now, it's never been condoning the actual act of abortion. Rather, it's accepting the concept that only one individual - the pregnant woman - is entitled to make the final decision, not her doctor, not her family and not her community.
Under that harsh light, anything less is tyranny.
Morgentaler's efforts to foster individual rights on the abortion issue continue to manifest themselves across Canadian society. Making individuals paramount in society and under the law has led to a continuous assault on social discrimination based on race, gender, age, religion and sexual orientation. Bullying was once society's way of forcing those who were different either underground or into line. Now bullying in all contexts is treated with the same social disdain once reserved for the victims of bullying.
The growing tolerance of personal marijuana use and possession, as well as the increasing expansion of end-of-life rights for the dying, are two examples of the individual rights issues that continue to change because of Morgentaler's fervent belief that without personal freedom, no society and no one in it is truly free.
