The Dominion - abortion

No Abortion Services on Prince Edward Island

Miles — Mon, 26 Mar 2012 13:18:50 +0000

Island women fight for access in their own province

PRINCE EDWARD ISLAND— Kandace Hagen expected her nomination for a youth social justice award to be slightly controversial. After all, if she won, she would be recognized for her work advocating for abortion access in Prince Edward Island. She didn’t, however, expect to face a campaign by anti-abortion activists trying to ensure she didn’t win.

The Atlantic Council for International Cooperation’s Active8! campaign highlights eight youth, and awards one, who have demonstrated outstanding leadership for social justice. The leading contestant, Tara Brinston, was entered into the campaign in recognition of her advocacy work for the rights of people with disabilities, but ended up alongside Hagen in the middle of an abortion access debate.

In a leaked email, a spokesperson of a local anti-abortion group sought to convince its supporters to pledge in favour of Brinston: “Please have all the youth you know sign in and vote for TARA BRINSTON [sic],” the email read. “We want to make sure that Kandice [sic] doesn’t win this award for youth leadership. The vote is close so please send this to all the youth and youth groups you know.”

Hagen, 24, has been part of a reinvigorated movement to get access to abortion services on PEI and to increase women’s access to information about their reproductive options. PEI is the only province in Canada with no abortion services offered within its borders.

This is despite the fact that since 1988 the Supreme Court has interpreted the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms’ guarantee of the “security of the person” as protecting women’s access to abortion services. This removed legal barriers to abortion for the majority of public hospitals across Canada.

Currently, a PEI woman seeking an abortion would have to travel out of the province. She could pay about $800 to the private Morgentaler Clinic in Fredericton, NB, or access a PEI-funded abortion at the Halifax General Hospital after a referral from her doctor. Either way, she would pay for her own travel costs. If she were in her second trimester, she would have to travel to Ottawa or Montreal, covering medical and all other costs as well.

This hypothetical "she” could have been Hagen. When Hagen sought the procedure two years ago, her doctor only informed her of the private option in Fredericton. The clinic, in turn, advised her to wait two weeks out of uncertainty that she would be past the necessary eight-week mark.

“When I did arrive, I found out that I was within a week of missing my first trimester date,” says Hagen. “Had my physician acted in my best interest, I could have had an ultrasound and found out that it was indeed a timely issue and been referred to Halifax immediately. Instead, I was almost put in an even more difficult position.”

It was in large part due to this experience that Hagen helped launch the PEI Reproductive Rights Organization (PRRO). The group raises awareness on what options already exist for women on PEI, and how these compare to the rest of Canada. “A lot of people were very surprised. Some had no idea that there were no abortion services available on PEI. Others were equally surprised that there was any funding at all,” says Hagen.

Bronwyn Rodd, another founding member of PRRO, sees a particularly strong “culture of silence” on PEI surrounding abortions— a culture that extends well into the local medical community.

PRRO sent a survey to every doctor in the province with detailed information about current abortion service options. Though many doctors responded by stating that they are pro-choice, none were willing to take a public pro-choice stance.

So far, the group has found one doctor from off-island willing to provide abortions on PEI. “One doctor anonymously spoke to the media here, saying he would be in favour of providing the service, but he would be afraid of retribution by the pro-life people. They are very active. PEI is so small and confidentiality is a challenge,” says Rodd.

Anti-abortion activists on PEI refer to their province as Canada’s "life sanctuary." In other words, “the only place without any legal access to abortion,” says Rodd. “[PEI] is very high on the priority list for the national pro-life movement, because we are sort of their ‘in’ for regressing [abortion] laws in general.” She believes local anti-abortion groups receive substantial financial support from their counterparts across North America.

A spokesperson for one such group,the PEI Right to Life Association, urged people to intervene in the Active8! campaign. Similar activists turned up in equal numbers to counter-demonstrate at PRRO’s 300-person protest last fall, the first pro-choice rally in the province in 20 years.

The association also published in PEI’s main newspaper, The Guardian, in which the group purports to clarify “a number of errors that can be confusing and present a false basis upon which to view the abortion issue on PEI.” The highlighted “errors” paint a picture in which PEI is in fact enshrining the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, rather than transgressing it.

PEI Liberal Premier Robert Ghiz has so far stood against any reforms to current practice. He’s gone on record stating that as long as he’s Premier, he’s “going to stay with the status quo," which he insists is a “good compromise.”

PRRO intends to push for abortion accessibility as far as it can. Rodd understands the Premier’s stance as an implied threat to legislate a barrier, should doctors start offering services. “We don’t think he has the jurisdiction to say that. There is no legal barrier in place here. So, we think he would be acting illegally...And if things do progress that way, we would be looking at launching a lawsuit.”

The Active8! campaign ultimately declared Hagen and Brinston joint winners earlier this month. To Hagen, the PEI government is “simply waiting for us to shut up,” she says, “which we won’t do until women in PEI have the same access as women in the rest of Canada.”

Peter Driftmier is a producer and collective member of Redeye on Vancouver Co-operative Radio, and a community organizer. He spends his mornings trying to convince elementary students at a Downtown Eastside breakfast program of the virtues of tofu, wholegrain bread, fruit and veggies.

Kandace Hagen

Reproductive Justice in Nova Scotia

hillarybain — Tue, 23 Feb 2010 06:30:22 +0000

Conference organizers take pro-active approach to fighting anti-abortion climate on campuses

HALIFAX—“We are women whose ultimate goal is the liberation of women in society,” echoes the chorus of Jane: Abortion and the Underground, a play that retells the story of an underground abortion service in Chicago. “One important way we are working towards that goal is by helping any woman who wants an abortion to get one as safely and as cheaply as possible under current conditions,” the chorus continues, reading lines from the service’s first flier.

The flier is from 1968.

Move forward to 2010 and an audience of about 200 is sitting in the MacNally Theatre at Saint Mary’s University in Halifax watching the story’s retelling and reflecting on what has changed and what has not.

The performance was a fundraiser for the conference Trust Women: A conference on reproductive justice. The need for such a conference was, for many, a surprising reminder of the work that still needs to be done.

“Because we’ve won the legal battle [on abortions] people think that the struggle is over,” says Jane Gavin-Hebert, organizer of the Trust Women conference. “But it's not."

Indeed, January 28th—the day of the conference—marked twenty-one years since the complete decriminalization of abortion.

There’s no denying that she’s right.

According to a 2007 study by Canadians for Choice entitled Reality Check, women across the country continue to face barriers in accessing abortion services. The report found that between 2003 and 2006, the number of hospitals providing abortions declined. Currently only 16 per cent of Canadian hospitals perform the simple procedure, and the majority of hospitals are in urban areas within 150 kilometers from the border.

Access in the Maritime Provinces was identified as especially poor. There are no abortion providers in Prince Edward Island, meaning women have to travel to Nova Scotia or New Brunswick for the procedure and often have to pay out of pocket.

In New Brunswick, only one hospital openly provides abortions, and the province refuses to fund abortion services at the Morgentaler Clinic in Fredericton. Women in New Brunswick are required to obtain referrals from two doctors in order to access a publicly-funded abortion.

While abortion services in Nova Scotia are more accessible than New Brunswick and PEI, there continues to be several barriers.

“There are definite gaps in therapeutic abortion services,” says Angus Campbell, the Executive Director of the Halifax Sexual Health Centre. “There are a very limited number of sites that will perform [Therapeutic Abortions] in Nova Scotia. The waiting time can be up to four weeks.”

In Nova Scotia, women are required to go through a three-step process to obtain an abortion. First, they must go to a clinic or family doctor and receive a referral, then the clinic or doctor will arrange for blood work and an ultrasound, and finally, the appointment will be scheduled. Average waiting times, says Campbell, is two to three weeks.

While about 50 per cent of abortions in Canada are performed at clinics, there are no abortion clinics in Nova Scotia.

“In Ontario all free standing clinics are covered under health care. This permits a woman to make her own appointment where she will get ultrasound, blood work and procedure, usually in one day but sometimes two days,” says Campbell. “The fact that women in Nova Scotia have to attend multiple medical appointments prior to the procedure is a barrier to accessing services.”

The abortion procedures in Nova Scotia are covered by provincial medical insurance, but despite the fact that the majority of women have to travel to Halifax for the procedure, there is no money available for travel or childcare costs. Also, women who have out of province health cards face fees anywhere from $230 to $700 for the procedure.

There is no master list available of where a woman can receive an abortion in the province, says Valerie Bellafonte, the communication director of the Nova Scotia Department of Health. The majority of therapeutic abortions in Nova Scotia are performed at the Termination of Pregnancy Unit (TPU) at the Victoria General Hospital in Halifax

In Reality Check, the study’s researcher had to make five separate phone calls to Victoria General and needed to leave a voicemail in order to speak with someone in the right department. The report explains that voicemail messages may create barriers for some women.

"Some women do not have a phone or do not have a place where they may privately talk about their unwanted pregnancy. Other women have concerns about a lack of confidentiality," says the report.

For Gavin-Hebert, who is also a mother and a Masters student in gender and women’s studies at Saint Mary’s University, in order to bring about real change in reproductive justice, the struggle has to be about more than access to abortion, it also has to be about educating the public.

Last winter, the Saint Mary's chaplaincy office sponsored a presentation by the Canadian Centre for Bioethical Reform entitled "Echoes of the Holocaust." This presentation is an extension of the centre's Genocide Awareness Project.

“The Genocide Awareness Project (GAP) is a visual display composed of 4’x8’ (or 6’x13’) billboards which graphically compare the victims of abortion to victims of other atrocities, such as Jews in the Holocaust,” reads the website of the Canadian Centre for Bioethical Reform.

GAP debuted on campuses in 1999 at the University of British Columbia.

Joyce Arthur, coordinator of the Abortion Rights Coalition of Canada and one of the speakers at the Trust Women conference, says that the presentations are not only unfair, but that at almost every campus that GAP has visited, students or the university, and often both, have put up a fight.

“GAP is deliberately provocative,” she says.

Many campuses have restricted or forbade GAP presentations from happening on campus.

Last February, the University of Calgary charged students with the group Campus Pro-Life with trespassing after they refused to adhere to the university’s restrictions regarding a GAP display the students organized in November 2008.

“This is not an issue about Freedom of Speech,” reads a statement from the university regarding the incident. “The paramount issues for the University are the needs to uphold its legal right to manage activities on campus, and to ensure the safety and security for the thousands of students, staff, faculty and community members on campus each day.”

In October, the Students’ Society of McGill University publicly censured an “Echoes of the Holocaust” presentation being held at McGill. The university allowed the presentation to go forward, and two students were arrested while protesting the event.

“We feel that McGill University has…failed to protect students' rights,” explains an open letter from the student union to McGill University.

“This event created a hostile environment and should not have been permitted. It is possibly most disappointing that when students' peacefully engaged in a public response to this hostile environment, they were removed through a police intervention,” the letter continues.

When it became apparent that Saint Mary’s University would be hosting one of these presentations, members of the feminist community, and other communities – such as the Atlantic Jewish Council – expressed their concerns regarding the risk of such a presentation on the health and safety of students, particularly women and Jewish students.

Ultimately, according to Gavin-Hebert, the university determined it to be a low-risk event, and the presentation went forward.

Afterward, Gavin-Hebert and another student initiated a complaint process with the university and provided some possible solutions – one of which was holding a feminist community education session.

The result was Trust Women: A conference on reproductive justice held at Saint Mary’s University on January 28.

“On campus, in this context of an anti-abortion climate, we needed to put forward a feminist analysis,” says Gavin-Hebert. “We wanted to do something that would be empowering.”

The conference included a full day of workshops for community organizers, students, and faculty, and an evening of keynote speakers .

In addition to Joyce Arthur, the evening event included presentations by Loretta Ross, a veteran feminist activist and national coordinator of the SisterSong Women of Color Reproductive Health Collective, and Jessica Yee, founder of the Native Youth Sexual Health Network.

It was important for the organizers that the conference focus on the broader topic of reproductive justice.

“We wanted to focus on abortion rights, but we know we need to go beyond that,” says Gavin-Hebert. “We need to fight for a rape free culture, for birth control, for child support and childcare, for sex worker rights. All of these things are connected.”

Kaley Kennedy is a student activist in Halifax. She has been working in the struggle for reproductive freedom since she was a teenager.

This article was produced by the Halifax Media Co-op.

Abortion

Reproductive Rights STILL an Election Issue

Anna Carastathis — Thu, 02 Oct 2008 14:23:57 +0000

focus on the born.jpg

"Focus on the Born": Image from a demonstration against Bill C-484, The Unborn Victims of Crime Act

When it became clear that an imminent election was in the stars, Harper distanced himself from the widely opposed Bill C-484, The Unborn Victims of Crime Act.

Now infamous, Bill C-484 was a private member bill introduced by Ken Epp (MP for Edmonton Sherwood Park, Alberta). It assigned legal personhood to unborn fetuses (in contravention of the Criminal Code). It was denounced by the Abortion Rights Coalition of Canada (ARCC), and other feminist organizations, as "an unconstitutional infringement on women’s rights." Similar laws are used in the United States to criminalize pregnant women who use drugs or alcohol for endangering the fetus, or to prosecute those who help them seek abortions.

While Epp refused to drop the Bill, which had passed its second reading, Harper vowed not to reopen the "debate" on abortion. (A promise, incidentally, that he has made before, during the 2004 election, and again in January 2005.)

But does that mean that reproductive rights are no longer an election issue?

Quite the opposite, according to the ARCC. Harper has said that he would not block private member bills about abortion (like C-484) in future.

In fact, on this issue, he has said he would lift tight party discipline and allow a free vote. Considering that the vast majority (74%) of current Conservative MPs are anti-choice, a majority Conservative Government could easily pass an anti-abortion bill into law.

Consider the following facts, largely culled from yesterday's press release issued by the ARCC: