By Will Offley
CANADA — Abortion providers in Canada and Québec are facing a new threat. A systematic and well-organised campaign now under way aims to identify and expose abortion providers, increasing the risk of terrorist attacks against them.
In the last four years there have been three attempts to murder Canadian physicians connected to abortion clinics. No one has been arrested or tried for any of these shootings. The new "identify and expose" strategy of leading anti-choice campaigners in British Columbia (BC) is a clear attempt to profit directly from this terror campaign.
The growth of anti-abortion terrorism (see accompanying article) obscures the depth of the victory won by the women's movement in general and the pro-choice movement specifically in the 1980s and 1990s. Sometimes it's hard to see that victory, given the dramatic extent to which English Canada's pro-choice movement has demobilised and dwindled since the peaks of activity in Ontario (1984-5) and BC (1988-89).
In the United States, the situation is much worse. There, choice is under a profound and sustained assault unlike anything taking place in Canada.
Across the US, access to legal and safe abortion is being killed by a thousand cuts. Almost every state legislature is a battleground, and every week more grim news piles up, of 24-hour waiting periods, of compulsory "counselling" (complete with colour pictures of foetal development), of laws requiring compulsory parental notification, of funding cuts, and of limitations, restrictions and outright prohibitions.
Over the last 12 months, 28 US states have passed laws banning late-term abortions!
Nothing like this is occurring in the Canadian state. This is not to say that access is universal. Enormous barriers still remain, particularly for poor, native and rural women. In Prince Edward Island it is impossible to get an abortion at all.
Despite this, the dominant picture in Canada is a dramatic contrast to the rollbacks, reversals and defeats occurring in the US. Compared to the US, the Canadian anti-choice movement is in a complete strategic impasse.
In the 1970s and '80s, the "antis" were a significant mass movement, capable of collecting 1,017,000 signatures to re-criminalise abortion in 1975, and mobilising 30,000 supporters at the Ontario legislature in October 1983, and 20,000 on Parliament Hill in September 1988.
What a contrast with their Parliament Hill mobilisation on May 14, which, despite the provision of special buses from Toronto and Montréal, attracted only 700.
In Vancouver, typical attendance at aggressive anti-choice pickets has declined from 1500 during the 1985 visit by Henry Morgentaler to less than 30 at the May convention of the National Abortion Federation.
There has been a similar decline in the more mainstream Life Chain mobilisation in Vancouver every October. Leading "antis" admit that participation has steadily dropped from a high of 15,000 in 1991 to 4000 last year.
The heyday of Operation Rescue's mass blockades of abortion clinics lasted only two years, from 1988 to 1990. Since then, the dozens of small blockades have occurred more as an annoyance than a serious threat to access (though no-one should underestimate the genuine distress caused to those women directly affected).
With the defeat of the blockades and a demobilisation of their supporters, the antis intensified their "sidewalk counselling" program (the involuntary, unasked, unwanted "counselling" of women by untrained religious fanatics). But this campaign, too, was hard hit by legal measures in Ontario and BC preventing the antis from targeting or approaching women in the immediate vicinity of the clinics.
No attempt to remove abortion funding at the provincial level has succeeded. Not even the well-organised campaign in Alberta in 1995, organised by the Committee to End Taxpayer-Funded Abortions. Every provincial government except Prince Edward Island now funds abortion. In most provinces, the decision to fund was the result of a victory by the pro-choice movement over a recalcitrant provincial government.
The durability and the depth of the pro-choice victory of the last 15 years obliges Canada's capitalist parties to be extremely careful in the way they approach the issue.
Just look at the right-wing Reform Party. Its leader, Preston Manning, is an evangelical Christian, but he's a smart politician too. Ever since the founding of Reform, he's steered directly away from allowing Reform to come out in opposition to abortion, even where this has meant serious fights with large sectors of his own membership. Manning understands very well the serious political price he would pay if Reform ever directly opposed abortion.
To avoid getting trapped between his anti-choice membership and a pro-choice electorate, he now proposes "a Reform policy to call for a referendum, constituency-by-constituency, whose results would be binding on the individual MP'". Not surprisingly, the leadership of the mainstream "anti" groups generally hate Reform.
Of course, current reverses on abortion rights in the US can't help but spill over the border. In the long run, every freedom is being threatened. But for now, this one victory persists.
[Will Offley is a researcher who was for many years in charge of security at Everywoman's Health Centre in Vancouver. This and the accompanying article are abridged from International Viewpoint (August), the magazine of the Fourth International. To subscribe, send $35 (cheques payable to Solidarity) to PO Box A105, Sydney South 2000, or contact <International_Viewpoint@compuserve.com> for a free electronic subscription.]