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drat -- this is where I meant to post this, and I put it in Choice instead. What the heck. It's glad tidings, so it wants spreading! All together: HIP HIP HOORAY!! http://www.cbc.ca/health/story/2008/07/01/morgentaler-order.html?ref=rssGov. Gen. Michaëlle Jean has named a leading abortion rights crusader to the Order of Canada, news that has outraged anti-abortion groups.
Dr. Henry Morgentaler is one of 75 Canadians to receive honours for their contribution to the country. The Governor General announced the new inductees on Tuesday after the names were recommended by an advisory panel.
Anti-abortion Conservative MPs are stressing that appointments to the order are not made by cabinet. Nine people, including two government appointees, sit on the Order of Canada panel.
'Hero to millions'
Now 85, Morgentaler, a Polish Holocaust survivor who immigrated to Montreal after the war, opened his first abortion clinic in 1969 and performed thousands of procedures, which were illegal at the time.
Morgentaler, a trained family physician, argued that access to abortion was a basic human right and women should not have to risk death at the hands of an untrained professional in order to end their pregnancies. Me, I'm rather surprised, and overjoyed. You can imagine what the anti-choice forces are. In the editorials, the op-eds, the letters to the editor, all over the net -- sputteringly outraged and putridly dishonest would about sum it up. I almost wish it hadn't happened, just so I didn't have to read their lying misogynist filth when I pick up the Saturday papers. But not quite. Back in 2003, the excellent columnist Heather Mallick (who has since parted company with the Globe over creative differences) wrote: http://www.theglobeandmail.com/series/morgentaler/Why doesn't this man have the Order of Canada?
The small, wiry Auschwitz survivor, number 95077, is an unlikely champion of women's rights - but in the past 35 years Dr. Henry Morgentaler has never wavered in his determination to secure abortion services for Canadians. On the eve of the 15th anniversary of the Supreme Court's landmark decision, he is preparing to open clinics in the Arctic.
... Dr. Morgentaler, who has survived more horrors and trials than most Canadians can imagine, and who is still a prophet without honour (he has yet to receive the Order of Canada), is positively fizzing with energy. He talks about his plans, not only to continue the battle, but to open new fronts. “Who said that life starts at 40? Life starts at 79,” says Dr. Morgentaler, looking young and vigorous in a leather Roots jacket. He's obviously enjoying himself immensely as he tucks into a dinner of caviar, borscht and blinis at a Montreal Russian restaurant, Troika, that was a favourite of his late brother, Mike. He hauls over the accordionist, with whom he sings Polish folk songs.
Dr. Morgentaler, however, is not dwelling on the past. He's full of enthusiasm for his latest project to open two clinics in the Canadian Arctic, for which he developed a passion during a recent visit. “I fell in love with the Arctic, the white vistas, going around the ice floes. Icebergs are beautiful, absolutely.” He saw a polar bear as it swam around the small boat, agitating in vain for the seal flesh the Inuit guide was bringing back, and was overwhelmed by the beauty of the huge creature. The federal government, at great cost, now flies Inuit patients who need abortions to southern Canada, where the frightened women, finding themselves in a strange environment, often decide against the procedure just so they can get home fast and suffer in a familiar place.
The image of this small - five feet, five inches and just 140 pounds - and energetic man planning to open abortion clinics in the North, and playing dodge'em with a polar bear in a vast, white landscape, is much different from the way his life could have played out. It was Nazi Germany's intention that he, as a Jew, die young and painfully. “I could have been a piece of dust 55 years ago,” he says. Born in Lodz, Poland, on March 19, 1923, Dr. Morgentaler was a Jew in a country that did not like Jews. As Catherine Dunphy wrote in her 1996 biography, Morgentaler: A Difficult Hero, he loved his parents deeply. His father, Josef, was a labour activist and a leader in the Jewish Socialist Labour Bund. The young Henry worshipped him, but his relationship with his mother, Golda Nikita Morgentaler, was more complicated. ... A gigantic nose-thumbing to the cretins on the Conservative government back benches. You can imagine how good it feels as a woman to get this vicarious recognition -- that my reproductive rights are important enough that the man who devoted his life to them is getting the Order of Canada. Odd, for sure, but good nonetheless. ;) |
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