Henry Morgentaler

During the 1970s and 1980s, Dr. Henry Morgentaler was one of Canada’s most controversial figures. His tireless campaigns to change the country’s abortion laws – and to provide safe, legal, medical abortions for women – not only consistently made him the lead story in newspapers and on newscasts across the country; it also polarized the abortion debate in Canada. The issue, as well as Morgentaler’s near twenty-year struggle with the Canadian court system, came to a head on January 28th,1988, when the Supreme Court of Canada declared the country’s law against abortion unconstitutional.

Coming to Canada at the end of World War II (he was a survivor of the Auschwitz death camp), Morgentaler completed medical school at the Universite de Montreal and then opened a family practice. He founded the first abortion clinic in Montreal in 1968 and in the following years challenged the criminal code by providing safe abortions for women- facing several trials as a result. Although he was acquitted each time by a jury, he went to jail for 10 months in 1975 when an earlier acquittal was reversed by a higher court.

Morgentaler operated eight clinics in Canada, until his death in May, 2013.