On Sept. 16, the government of Prince Edward Island (PEI) announced its intention to build the province’s first abortion clinic—a province of nearly 75,000 women. PEI has denied its population the right to seek an abortion within its borders for the last three decades.
Prior to reading that article, I never would have thought abortion was a particularly contentious issue in our country. A Supreme Court decision saw abortion decriminalized in Canada in 1988. Public opinion is strongly in favour of a woman’s right to seek an abortion whenever she wishes, with 57 per cent of Canadians expressing this view in a 2016 Ipsos poll.
Despite all this, Canada still has a lot of progress to make when it comes to abortion.
A 2015 feature by Chatelaine magazine explored how abortion is taught in Canadian medical schools. Alongside testimony from students and instructors who spoke about systemic discomfort surrounding abortion instruction, the article reported that in the mid-2000s, half of Canada’s medical schools did not teach abortion techniques to their students. More recent figures aren’t available, as little analysis is done into abortion curricula in Canada—something that is in itself disturbing.
With the federal government’s July 1 decision to make an at-home abortion pill called Mifegymiso available for prescription in Canada, physicians have become increasingly responsible for dealing with patient requests to terminate pregnancy. Mifegymiso is intended to increase the accessibility of abortion services. General practitioners can prescribe the pill, making it unnecessary for women to travel to a hospital or abortion clinic to terminate a pregnancy—a particular challenge for women living in rural or remote areas, like PEI, where the government offers little support for clinic operation.
While doctors have technically been able to prescribe the pill for more than two months, a variety of barriers have prevented the pill from reaching the markets where it is needed most.
In order to be able to prescribe Mifegymiso, Health Canada mandates that doctors undergo specific training—more extensive than required to prescribe any other drug aside from methadone. They must also dispense the drug themselves, rather than send patients to a pharmacy.
Before taking Mifegymiso, women are required to undergo an ultrasound to ensure the fetus is under the required 49 days of age, and doctors can compel patients to take the drug in the office under their supervision. All of these measures seem designed to make it difficult for doctors to facilitate—and woman to undergo—pregnancy termination by way of the prescription drug.
However, the most pressing problem in providing Mifegymiso to Canadian women is a lack of supply. Doctors are still waiting to receive the pills they are now permitted to prescribe. An exact date that the pills will rollout to market is unknown.
The Mifegymiso debacle has generated minimal media coverage—a Google News search of ‘Mifegymiso, Canada’ produces less than 200 results. Meanwhile, a search of “Robin Camp,” the judge facing a Canadian Judicial Council inquiry after making sexist remarks in a sexual assault trial over which he presided, produces over 125,000.
Rape culture, missing and murdered Indigenous women, and gendered wage inequality have dominated headlines related to women’s issues over the past several years, while the continuing struggle for abortion access has largely fallen off the public consciousness. While these women’s issues deserve the abundant and critical attention they’re being given by the press, it’s disturbing to see certain narratives prioritized over others.
We can’t allow ourselves to forget that a woman’s right to a safe and affordable abortion in Canada is far from secure.
