In a country known for tolerance and free medical care for all citizens,
Dr. Morgentaler was for decades at the center of battles between
powerful forces like the Roman Catholic Church, which opposed abortion
for any reason short of saving an endangered mother’s life, and women’s
groups that contended that the decision not to bear a child is a
personal one.
Dr. Morgentaler, who had survived Nazi death camps at Auschwitz and
Dachau and emigrated from Poland to Canada after World War II, basically
founded the Canadian abortion-rights movement in the late 1960s. He
opened abortion clinics across the country, trained hundreds of doctors
to perform abortions and said he had performed tens of thousands of them
himself.
Dr. Morgentaler was threatened with death, attacked with garden shears,
roughed up by a mob, caricatured as a baby butcher, splashed with
ketchup and accused of fomenting violence. He escaped injury when one
clinic was firebombed. After several abortion doctors were shot, he wore
bulletproof vests and installed bulletproof windows at home.
I wonder if anyone ever considered just talking to him.
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