On access to abortions, Canada has a long way to go
In the U.S., as Republican presidential candidates jockey for public attention, women’s access to crucial reproductive health services has been caught in the crossfire.
Planned Parenthood, which provides women across North America with services ranging from contraception to STI testing to cancer screening to abortions, has found itself at the centre of a political firestorm after an anti-abortion group released a series of manipulative videos designed to vilify the organization.
Suddenly, Republican politicians (and would-be presidential nominees) are racing to position themselves against Planned Parenthood in an attempt to curry favour with right-wing voters. Last week, the U.S. Senate voted on legislation to block federal funding to the organization, and while the motion did not pass, it will be put to a vote in the fall that has the potential to cause a government shutdown. Meanwhile, on a state level, Louisiana, New Hampshire and Alabama have all terminated their Medicaid contracts with Planned Parenthood, a decision that will leave many women — particularly low-income ones who rely on the clinics for many basic health care services — stranded.
It’s deeply disturbing to look across the border and see how cavalierly the health and safety of American women are being tossed aside. The debate currently raging in the U.S. around reproductive health care just serves to reaffirm a sad truth: for many people, the health and safety of women simply do not matter. To the Republican politicians who have made defunding Planned Parenthood a priority, it seems women’s lives and bodies are mere tools for inciting easy political and moral outrage.
In light of all this, it’s easy to look at the state of reproductive health in Canada and feel a comparative sense of pride. Just recently, it was announced that RU-486, or Mifegymiso, a drug widely considered the “gold standard” of medical abortions, will be available as early as January. This is excellent news; the drug could play an enormous part in making abortion accessible and safe, especially for women who live in communities where access to clinics and abortion services is either difficult to obtain or, as is the case in Prince Edward Island, completely nonexistent.
But as we celebrate the victory for women’s health that this new drug constitutes, it’s crucial to remember that Canada is by no means perfect when it comes to providing safe and accessible health care to women.
For a start, Canada is well behind the international curve in approving the drug — some European countries have been using it since the ’80s, and even in the U.S., it’s been legal since 2000.
Then there’s the matter of P.E.I. In that province, there are still no abortion clinics whatsoever; women who want to obtain a surgical abortion must travel out of province, paying their own way, to receive one. And as Vice magazine recently reported, getting a medical abortion in the province is “hard to do unless you know someone who knows someone.” This lack of access has real and incredibly dangerous consequences. That same piece told the disturbing stories of women who had been advised to simply take enormous quantities of vitamin C to induce a miscarriage, or who were refused adequate follow-up care by physicians who left them in serious danger, and in some cases caused them real harm, by doing so.
Not to mention the fact that although RU-486 will theoretically make it easier for women to obtain medical abortions in places where their access was previously limited, there is still no guarantee that physicians will prescribe it. In Ontario, doctors can refuse to prescribe the drug on ethical grounds as long as they refer patients to other resources. In P.E.I., where many doctors are already reluctant (or flat-out refuse) to provide this kind of care to their patients, the introduction of one new drug will probably not be enough to turn things around. Nor does it mean that doctors who were previously reticent to provide the follow-up care that can be necessary after an abortion will suddenly be ready and willing to do so.
At best, the availability of RU-486 only represents a step in the right direction; there is still a great deal of work to be done in terms of changing ingrained cultural attitudes about abortion and women’s health on top of the practical work of making these services available to all.
As in so many other things, Canada’s record on abortion can only be judged by what it has to offer those women who have the least amount of access to the services they need, or the fewest resources to pursue them. Until we can say with confidence that women in every community and every province across the country have unfettered access to the medical services they need and deserve, we still have a long, long way to go.