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.
By HEATHER MALLICK
Saturday, January 18, 2003
You'd think the fight was long over and the fighter, who's almost 80, would be ready to quit. You'd be wrong.
Although it's been 15 years since Dr. Henry Morgentaler finally won the Supreme Court of Canada decision that gave Canadian women the right - the inalienable female right - to have an abortion, the truth is that in some parts of the country it's still simply a theoretical right. A number of provincial governments, aided and abetted by anti-choice lobbies, are making it their business to find wiggle room in the law. And they seem to be getting away with it.
But 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.
This is the place where he and Mike, who died in 1996, shared their last meal. His brother's ashes have been scattered at Auschwitz joining those of their mother, who was on the same death train as her sons but never came out.
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.
He felt that his mother, a busy woman preoccupied with her other children, a sister and a brother, did not love him. He only unravelled the complications of his feelings about her after years of psychoanalysis.
“When I was 4¼, my brother was born,” he says, recalling his childhood. “From that time on, I believed that my mother didn't love me anymore, because she was taking care of the baby. . . . It wasn't true. She did love me. I realized later that if she'd hadn't . . . I wouldn't have been the warm, loving person that I am.” He figured it out too late to tell her; she died in a gas chamber before he realized the extent of her love for him.
He has vivid memories of anti-Semitism, including being surrounded by gangs of Polish boys calling him names, accusing him of killing Jesus. He ran away because he felt there was nothing else he could do, but the thought of it still shames and angers him. He also regrets that he didn't go with his mother to visit his father in jail, after Mr. Morgentaler was arrested for labour activism.
“I was scared,” Dr. Morgentaler recalls. “I expected the worst to happen. The worst happened.”
His father was taken to a detention camp, where he was tortured and murdered by the Gestapo. Henry, his older brother Michael and their mother remained in the Lodz ghetto, where Jews survived doing labour that was useful to the Nazis, making machinery, boots, munitions and other goods crucial to the war effort.
In 1944, Henry, his brother and their mother were rounded up and shipped to Auschwitz. His number isn't tattooed on his arm because, by then, the Nazis were too rushed. “But I remember my number: 95077.”
Henry and his brother somehow survived the scrutiny of Josef Mengele, the notorious Nazi torturer, on the train platform, and were allowed to remain alive to work. They never saw their mother again. His older sister, Ghitel, who was living in Warsaw, was to die in Treblinka.
The young Morgentaler, just out of Auschwitz, was a fragile creature weighing 70 pounds. He had lost all his teeth in the camp. But he revelled in his survival rather than being stunned by it. The United Nations was offering scholarships at German universities to Jewish survivors; to his family's horror, he accepted one so he could attend medical school. He endured a year with a hostile German family that was forced to house him under the new regime.
He refused to go to Israel, believing that Zionism was just creating another ghetto for Jews, and continued his medical studies in Brussels. Thanks to a cousin, he and his then-wife Chava, whom he had known since childhood, were able to set sail for the “new world” in 1950. They chose Montreal.
Yes, he encountered anti-Semitism at the Université de Montréal, but this was nothing new. He decided not to join the Jewish General Hospital, where other Jewish doctors congregated, and he did not specialize. He liked his patients and chose to become a general practitioner.
But he remained an internationalist. “I wanted to be part of modern humanity, where all people were not Jewish. The fact that you are Jewish does not mean you have to put a ghetto around you,” he once said.
Dr. Morgentaler became a member of the Humanist Fellowship of Montreal. Humanists, a group of increasing influence, are anti-religious and respect rational thought and human compassion above all. By being a physician, Dr. Morgentaler was living out his Humanist beliefs and was enjoying a safe, prosperous existence in Montreal. Life was good.
On Oct. 19, 1967, he took his first step in throwing it all away. Abortion at that time was illegal, and the horrors of abortions attempted by desperate women - injections with Drano, for instance - were beyond description. On that day, Dr. Morgentaler, representing the Humanist Fellowship, publicly testified before a federal government committee about his belief that any pregnant woman should have the right to an abortion, a safe one.
It made headlines, and women began to show up at his office begging for abortions. He had to look them in the eye and say he could not help them. He was perfectly able to, of course, but it was against the law. “I was caught in my own rhetoric. I felt like a coward and a hypocrite.” What would his father have thought of such a man?
So, in 1968, he secretly performed an abortion on the daughter of a close friend. In 1969, he gave up his family practice, and began openly doing illegal abortions.
In doing so, he launched a 20-year battle with the national government, the judicial system, the police force, religions of every brand, snipers, and a social system that Dr. Morgentaler says is still very much a patriarchy. His weapon was his belief in the common sense of Canadians; he simply did not think a jury would convict him of a crime. He was right.
Dr. Morgentaler was first arrested in Quebec for performing an abortion in 1970, three years before the U.S. Supreme Court was to legalize abortion in Roe v. Wade, which made the procedure a constitutional right for American women. In 1973, he announced he had performed 5,000 illegal abortions, and subsequently performed one on camera for the CTV investigative program W5.
He was acquitted by a Quebec jury of 11 men and one woman. In 1974, five Roman Catholic judges on the Quebec Court of Appeal overturned the jury verdict. He was sentenced to prison and went to jail. He went on to be acquitted by two more juries.
In 1975, the law was changed so that a jury verdict could no longer be overturned on appeal - it's known as the Morgentaler Amendment. The following year, Quebec's Parti Québécois announced it would no longer enforce abortion law in that province. Dr. Morgentaler had survived Auschwitz, but it was in a Quebec prison where he was stripped naked, suffered chest pains and felt tormented and humiliated.
“He wouldn't have been sent to jail if he had been French - but he's a Jew,” said prominent feminist Laura Sabia, now deceased, in a letter of protest from the National Council of Jewish Women to Otto Lang, then federal justice minister and to Marc Lalonde, then minister for the status of women, both of whom are Order of Canada recipients.
Feminine support has buoyed Dr. Morgentaler throughout his life. He has had many close relationships with women - his charm is legendary - and he continues to inspire intense loyalty among female employees and friends. He is now married to his third wife, Arlene, 30 years his junior, with whom he has a teenage son; he proposed marriage to her a month before his 75th birthday. He also has three children by two previous wives.
“My whole life,” he says, “I have been looking for the mother-love that I missed. That explains my many relationships with women. Deep down, with me, I was afraid they would leave me, or stop loving me. It was a psychological strategy to make sure there would always be a woman who loves me.”
His relationship with a fellow member of the Humanist Fellowship who was a German sculptress failed after he read Jerzy Kosinski's The Painted Bird, the story of a Jewish boy in Nazi-occupied Poland. When he first met her, “I didn't think I should hold it against her that she was German, and I didn't think she should hold it against me that I was Jewish.”
But after reading Kosinski's book, “I suddenly realized that this woman was German! It finished our relationship. . . . The accumulated rage in me against Germans just came out. Like my rage against governments that oppress women. That's a good target. I don't take it out in my personal relationships. I don't engage in personal vendettas. Not to hurt people, but to hurt systems which oppress people.”
He has been back to Auschwitz, and thrown rocks at the gate reading Arbeit Macht Frei [work makes you free]. He has revisited his childhood apartment in Lodz, with what appears to be some small degree of enjoyment, perhaps because in some way it was an homage to his mother.
“I knew I could not save my mother. But I could save other mothers. It was an unconscious thought. It became almost like a command. If I help women to have babies at a time when they can give love and affection, they will not grow up to be rapists or murderers. They will not build concentration camps.”
He was greatly influenced by the psychoanalyst Alice Miller's For Your Own Good: Hidden Cruelty in Child-rearing and the Roots of Violence, a book that makes a compelling case against corporal punishment.
“When the Nazis killed my mother and father, I figured I was responsible. I was a bad person. So I had to redeem myself through good deeds, in line with my parents' beliefs about social justice and the equality of all people.”
He describes the landmark Supreme Court decision on Jan. 28, 1988, as the greatest day of his life. “It was a vindication of everything I believed in. For the first time, it gave women the status of full human beings able to make decisions about their own lives.”
Under the old law, an abortion was legal only if it was provided in a hospital, with the approval of a therapeutic-abortion committee composed of three doctors. The court found the procedure to be arbitrary, demeaning and potentially injurious to women who required a routine medical procedure at the earliest opportunity.
Ironically, the decision was not a major affirmation of women's rights. It struck the law simply because hospital abortion procedures were cumbersome and unfair. Still, it has had massive social impact, and the law has never been replaced.
Before that decision came down, he endured several trials, numerous arrests, eight raids on his clinics, a fire-bombing and 10 months in jail. His legal battles have cost an estimated $2-million, mostly paid by supporters, except for $300,000 he covered himself.
It began in 1983, when Dr. Morgentaler and two colleagues were charged in Ontario with procuring illegal miscarriages. They were acquitted by a Toronto jury the following year. The Ontario Court of Appeal then reversed the verdict, setting the stage for the final showdown in the Supreme Court.
The prosecutor in the case, Alan Cooper, has said he never really stood a chance. “I knew 90 per cent of Canada was against me. Dr. Morgentaler was like a national hero. Even devout Catholics were coming up to me during the trial and saying: `How can you prosecute him?' Even my parents said that to me once.”
Today, each province has adopted its own approach. Some permit abortions in hospitals or private clinics and fully fund both. Others have erected impediments, and it is against these that Dr. Morgentaler continues to fight.
“I'm aware someone might pump a few bullets into me. But that won't deter me because I believe what I do is important. We have a safer, better society as a result. I felt it was my duty. And I've never regretted it,” he once said.
Over the years, he has never wavered in his commitment. “I fight these provincial governments that oppress women. I enjoy fighting them. And I'm sure I'm going to win too. It's a pleasure for me to bring them to court where they would bring me to court.” But he is all too aware of the small, vocal and, in the past 10 years, increasingly violent minority that opposes his work. He owns a bullet-proof vest that he finds “cumbersome” to wear.
When his case eventually came before the Supreme Court in 1988, the majority ruled 5-2 in his favour. Madam Justice Bertha Wilson, herself the recipient of an Order of Canada in 1992, wrote that a woman's decision to have an abortion “deeply reflects the way the woman thinks about herself and her relationship to others and to society at large. It is not just a medical decision; it is a profound social and ethical one as well.”
She added that it was likely impossible for a man even to understand the dilemma of a pregnant woman contemplating an abortion, “not just because it is outside the realm of his personal experience - but because he can relate to it only by objectifying it, thereby eliminating the subjective elements of the female psyche, which are at the heart of the dilemma.”
And there it stands. Statistics Canada reports that there were 110,331 abortions in Canada in 1998, about a third done in clinics, the rest in hospitals. Morgentaler clinics across Canada performed about 19,900 abortions last year, Dr. Morgentaler's assistant reports. She said the youngest patient at the Toronto clinic was 13, and the oldest, 51.
There is no way of knowing how many women wanted abortions and could not get them. For that reason Dr. Morgentaler's victory is not yet complete. Nevertheless, most people in his position would have received their Order of Canada years ago. His omission is puzzling.
Dr. Morgentaler doesn't expect an Order of Canada; it's one of those vanity things, he says. But he is getting some recognition; CTV has just finished a television movie about him, called Choice. Written by Suzette Couture and directed by John L'Ecuyer, Choice was produced by Kevin Tierney, with Laszlo Barna of DaVinci's Inquest as executive producer. It was filmed in Montreal last fall, the filming going unpublicized for the sake of the cast's safety. When Dr. Morgentaler visited the set, the cast reacted with intense curiosity and emotion.
Mr. L'Ecuyer says the film is not intended to simply “chronicle the peaks and valleys of his life, but to explore the psyche of the man: What drove him? The script is essentially a character study.”
David Eisner, who plays a young, dark-bearded Dr. Morgentaler in a bathrobe (in this scene, he is at his Mont-Royal home in 1967 discussing with friends and family whether to make the Humanist declaration to the House of Commons committee), says the essence of the man is his courage. “The younger generation simply doesn't know” what Dr. Morgentaler has accomplished, Mr. Barna says.
Certainly, Dr. Morgentaler's younger patients at his Toronto clinic seem blithe about anything beyond their personal situation. They are free to choose, and why wouldn't they be?
Dr. Morgentaler has said he likes this attitude. Why shouldn't they take their human rights for granted? Their insouciance is a triumph, maybe the greatest triumph of all.
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