During the fall of 2019, my mood sank. I wept on the kitchen floor, daunted by the pile of dishes in the sink. The exhaustion terrified me. I felt wretched, as if slowly poisoned. Would I become unable to go to work? I was sure PMS was at least partly to blame. My period seemed pretty late.
You know where this is going.
Driving home from the grocery store one evening, I pulled a sharp U-turn toward the pharmacy. I had to rule out even the faintest possibility. As I peed on the stick, I grumbled over my wasted $12.49–I’d tried to get pregnant for years before we became an adoptive family. My jaw went slack. Double lines.
***
The Basilica of Our Lady Immaculate pulls at me. It’s a cathedral built on a central hill overlooking the downtown Guelph area, featuring a stone figure of Mary. I am drawn less to the church than I am to Mary. A snake winds around her bare feet like a pet. Or a promise.
Originally, that snake held an apple in its wide jaws. Yes, a snake, biting an apple. But the snake’s head is gone now. I wonder if it was a random act of vandalism, or someone angry with the church. Or maybe a Catholic offended by the apple and what it represents.
On the northeastern side of the hill, mature hickory trees drop spiky green balls to the sidewalk, and bees hum in the goldenrod, clover, black-eyed Susan and bergamot. On the opposing side, silver maples shade mown grass. Adjacent to the rectory, there is a garden, installed by Guelph & Area Right to Life in 2016. It bears a plaque that reads: Dedicated to the memory of miscarried and aborted children.
Over 70 donors spent $91,000 to erect a small pavilion with a walkway, benches, staid plantings of hostas, and various religious statues: Jesus holding an infant, Jesus with children in his lap, an angel kneeling over an empty crib.
According to the Guelph Right to Life website, the garden is “For any parent who has lost a child, especially mothers mourning the loss of their little one through abortion” (emphasis added).
***
My partner and I did not want a second baby. We spent a tense evening hunched over the laptop, searching for the earliest available abortion care, and decided on the Mississauga Women’s Clinic, just over an hour away. Now that I knew why I felt so sick, I wanted it done as soon as possible. A friend came over to visit that weekend, coincidentally wearing a shirt reading “Support All Pregnancy Outcomes and Experiences.” I asked them if they’d be willing to accompany me to my upcoming abortion appointment while my partner stayed home with our baby. I wanted help navigating unfamiliar highways. They immediately agreed.
The clinic was housed on the fourth floor of a large office building with a quiet, softly lit waiting room. The staff were calm and kind.
For this non-surgical abortion, I took mifepristone to end the pregnancy. I swallowed the pill while the clinician watched. Maybe it was the placebo effect, but I felt relief within minutes. The appointment was covered by my Ontario Health Insurance Plan and lasted perhaps an hour. I was sent home with several misoprostol pills to help my body expel the dead tissue.
***
I need to say how grateful I am for the innovation of Brazilian women,1 who read the label warning against the use of misoprostol during pregnancy and engaged in world-shaping citizen science. Misoprostol, originally developed as a medication for gastric ulcers, causes cramping and bleeding like that of a heavy period or miscarriage. By the 1980s, in Brazil, a country with highly restricted abortion access, word spread widely that misoprostol could cause a menstrual period and hundreds of thousands of Brazilians used it to manage their reproductive lives. Thus, the medication drastically reduced the numbers of people hospitalised with severe injuries from coat hangers or bleach.
Brazilian women’s resourceful off-label use of misoprostol, and willingness to talk to each other about it, eventually led to its scientific confirmation as an effective abortion drug, and the worldwide adoption of medication abortion as an easier and cheaper way to end pregnancies. Because of these Brazilian women, Brazil is now known as the birthplace of self-managed abortion.
I was devastated to learn that, in 1998, the Brazilian government made misoprostol illegal to buy. In 2006, it became illegal to publish information about misoprostol online. In 2018, with the election of far right-wing Jair Bolsonaro as president, access to anything to do with abortion got a lot worse.
Local feminist networks that previously supplied misoprostol along with instructions for safe use have almost entirely stopped, for fear of prosecution. Now that drug traffickers control most of the misoprostol in Brazil, even if you can afford to pay their prices for misoprostol pills, you can’t be sure of what you’re actually buying. And if anything goes wrong after taking the medication, it’s unsafe to seek medical care. The penalty for having an abortion in Brazil is up to three years in prison.
***
At times, I struggled to breathe through the pain. I was initially concerned that I’d lose too much blood, but a friend who is a midwife promised she’d come over at any time—day or night—to check if I needed to go to a hospital. I vomited once, but I knew what to expect. I am told that pain is created by the brain when it perceives a threat. If I had been scared or upset, it probably would have hurt a lot more. After noticing a peak followed by a release, I was relieved to think that I was probably through the worst of it.
I was well-held by my community. All of my close friends had quickly supported my decision, and I had access to a vehicle to get to and from the clinic. As a White and straight-passing woman, I was protected from effects of racism or homophobia during my appointment. Owning my own small business, I was able to take time off work while my employees covered my shifts. I spent a couple days in bed, napping and watching Netflix while my partner parented solo—which, though medically necessary, also seemed a luxury. Because I had access to attentive care and community, my abortion was a supportive experience.
Abortion itself does not need to be a traumatic event. It needs to be basic healthcare.
***
Local activists protested Right to Life’s garden, referring to it as “the anti-abortion garden,” and pointed out the obvious: that offering a place to grieve a miscarriage is very different from offering a place to grieve an abortion. Jakki Jeffs, the garden’s founder and organiser, claims that “thousands of women” regret their abortions.
There’s something alarming about how anti-abortionists cling to conceptualizations of regret or danger in abortions, thought to wreck our health or spiral into fatalities, all while running “pregnancy crisis centres” that mislead, guilt, and delay under the guise of providing medical care. How they claim to care about us while harming us.
An abortion research project, The Turnaway Study, tracked the experiences of people who’d had abortions and those who’d been denied abortion care, doing regular interviews with almost 1,000 people over five years. To no surprise, they found that those denied abortions had worse mental health and financial struggles than those who’d had access to the abortions they needed. Five years later, 95% of those who’d received an abortion said they’d made the right decision.
The theory of widespread post-abortion regret has been thoroughly debunked. But so what? Do proponents of forced birth care about the people who are forced to give birth?
***
I’m grateful for pro-choice feminists and Dr. Henry Morgentaler.
“Therapeutic abortions” were legalised in Canada in 1969, which meant that you’d be allowed an abortion if a committee of doctors decided that the pregnancy threatened your life or your health. Of course, access was uneven and unpredictable, with processing delays, most hospitals not even having a committee, and many lower income people pressured to accept sterilisation as a condition of receiving an abortion. As a result, Canadian hospitals commonly managed entire wards of patients suffering horribly after botched illegal abortions. Perforated organs, pelvic infections, hysterectomies, death.2
After decades of work by pro-choice groups across the country, abortion provider Dr. Henry Morgentaler challenged the Supreme Court, arguing that the 1969 law which required medical, life-threatening implications for a pregnant individual to receive legal access to abortion, violated pregnant people’s rights under the Charter of Rights and Freedoms.
Henry Morgentaler was a child of Jewish socialists and a survivor of the Holocaust. He was born in Lodz, Poland, and was a teenager when the Nazis turned Lodz into a ghetto, detaining Jewish persons and keeping them on starvation rations. In 1942, Morgentaler was shipped to Auschwitz and then to the Dachau concentration camp. He managed to survive until liberation in 1945, emigrated to Canada, and became a medical doctor in Montreal.
Biographer Catherine Dunphy said of Morgentaler: “He needed something to fight for. He also needed to fight.”
He fought lawmakers and politicians on the abortion cause for decades, opened 20 abortion clinics across the country, and trained over a hundred doctors to perform abortions safely. His clinics were raided by police and firebombed. He was arrested, received death threats, and had a heart attack while in solitary confinement. He never quit.
At the same time, Morgentaler was famously a proud womaniser, and a complex man who relished the limelight. He liked to fly into a major Canadian city, announce his intention to open an illegal abortion clinic, make dramatic speeches for the press and then fly away, leaving local feminists to deal with the chaos in his wake. But he was a crucial part of the movement. In what is known as the Morgentaler Decision, the Supreme Court of Canada struck down the 1969 law, decriminalising abortion in 1988.
***
Abortion is now considered an essential health service in Canada, no more governed by criminal law than hip surgery or over-the-counter antacids. But we cannot get complacent about our reproductive rights, not with the overturn of Roe v Wade in the USA, the resulting severe restrictions to abortion care in many of their states, and the expansion of fetal personhood ideology which prioritises the rights of a fetus over the rights of the pregnant person.
Conservative MPs have been trying for years to re-open the abortion debate in Canada. MP Cathay Wagantall’s private member’s bill C-311, “The Violence Against Pregnant Women Act,” tried to amend the Criminal Code to state that knowingly assaulting a pregnant woman is to be considered aggravating circumstances for sentencing purposes. But judges and parole boards can already take the injury of a fetus into account when making decisions, which leaves efforts to insert the concept of fetal personhood into Canadian law as Wagantall’s motivation for this bill. The bill, couched in the language of public safety and protection of pregnant women, was defeated.
In case anyone is confused about the “safety” these kinds of laws offer to pregnant people, let’s remember what happened to Brittany Watts, a Black woman from Warren, Ohio. In September 2023, she arrived at the hospital pregnant, in pain and passing large blood clots. The doctor found that her fetus was not viable. Watts eventually miscarried into a toilet at home (not an uncommon occurrence) and used a plunger to unblock the toilet. Traumatised and in shock, she disposed of what she thought were the remains in a bucket in her backyard and went back to the hospital with a life-threatening hemorrhage. A nurse at the hospital called the police about the miscarriage and the “need to locate the fetus.” Police invaded Watts’ home and found that the fetus was lodged in the toilet pipe. They tore the entire toilet out of her bathroom and took it to a morgue, where it was broken open to remove the fetus.
The autopsy report showed that the fetus had died in the womb. Watts was handcuffed, arrested, and interrogated, initially facing felony charges of abusing a corpse and potentially a year in prison. After an international outcry over the next three months, the grand jury decided not to indict her.
Aside from quietly bleeding to death alone at home, what could Watts have done to avoid police involvement with her miscarriage? People in the US who have experienced a pregnancy loss outside of a hospital have been charged both for bringing the fetal remains to a doctor or hospital and for burying or disposing of the fetal remains themselves.
Pregnant people in the US are regularly denied various constitutional rights on the pretext of protecting a fetus. This is called pregnancy criminalisation, most commonly occurring when a pregnant person uses substances (both legal and illegal), as fetal personhood ideology meets the war on drugs.
Pregnant people, especially people of colour, people who use drugs, and people with low incomes, are increasingly vulnerable to criminalisation in ways that do not exist for people who are not pregnant. Have a miscarriage? Charged with murder or manslaughter. Drive too slowly to the hospital on delivery day? Charged with criminal neglect. Have HIV while pregnant? Child abuse. This is not speculation about what might occur, this is what’s already happening in the US.3
Fetal personhood ideology establishes the concept of the fetus as a separate and unique victim, with rights prioritised over those of the pregnant person. Fetal personhood is used to override full human rights for pregnant people. This cannot be overstated.
We must identify and reject the ideology of fetal personhood, not only because it could be used to re-open the abortion debate in Canada. Rejecting fetal personhood is a necessary part of building a world in which everyone receives the support and medical care that they need, without risk of surveillance or incarceration.
As I write this, Watts’ GoFundMe page has raised over $250,000 to cover legal expenses, home repairs, medical bills, and trauma counselling. An update in February 2024 said that contributions would be not only funding her treatment but also providing her with the ability to transition herself to full-time advocacy work.
May Brittany Watts get everything she needs for the rest of her life to heal and thrive.
***
I’d love to see a federally funded national education campaign, teaching providers and patients about the safety and efficacy of “no-touch” medication abortion, because of the massive problem with abortion access in Canada. Outside of large city centres, it’s hard to find providers—many must travel over 100 km to receive care. People of colour and those living in poverty are disproportionately impacted. Indigenous people, for example, must travel an average of three times further than White people to receive care. It doesn’t have to be like this, and the solution to these barriers could save healthcare costs, not deepen them.
The COVID-19 pandemic has profoundly altered abortion access, not only normalising “no-touch” or self-managed medication abortion, but in contributing vast amounts of data on just how safe “no-touch” medication abortion really is.
After switching to telemedicine abortion at the onset of the pandemic, Bay Centre for Birth Control at Women’s College Hospital in Toronto reported no serious adverse events in 12 months of providing “no-touch” abortions. Similarly, a recent cohort study using ultrasounds of over 50,000 people in the UK found no difference in treatment success or serious adverse events between telemedicine and in-person appointments.
While the “no-touch” approach doesn’t work for everyone, most abortions are uncomplicated, first-trimester abortions that don’t need ultrasounds or blood work. As Molly Dutton-Kenny dryly notes: “Clinicians do not need to personally dispense medications or watch as clients swallow them.” Many would rather collect the necessary medication from the pharmacy or their mailbox and have the procedure at home. While “no-touch” medication abortion may not remove racism, classism, homophobia or transphobia from healthcare, it can help resolve the travel barrier.
Currently, any nurse practitioner or family physician can legally prescribe medication for an abortion in Canada. When more of them are adequately informed about this option, they will.
If I had been able to avoid travel, my abortion experience could have been made more comfortable.
***
Sara Bortolon-Vettor, one of the organisers of the peaceful rally against the “anti-abortion garden” in 2016, said of the Guelph basilica, “It offends me that I can’t go up those steps anymore, or I can’t enjoy the art and the architecture.” I empathise, as I felt similarly pushed out, away from that hill. But now, I love it even more fiercely than before.
I kiss Mary’s bare toes as I pass. I sit beneath my favourite silver maple, across from a wily apple tree, only slightly taller than my five-year-old, and already heavy with fruit. I close my eyes to better hear the cicadas keening overhead, the grasshoppers and crickets chirring unseen. During my last visit, I poured a mason jar of my own menstrual blood onto the grass.
I look out over the rooftops, my back to the “anti-abortion garden”. My sit bones root into the earth. I imagine the vast forest that grew beyond the hill 1,000 years ago. And I imagine what an abortion gratitude garden could look like.
A bed of yellow tansy and purple pennyroyal with a plaque celebrating Dr Henry Morgentaler, in all his complications, as well as the thousands of pro-choice organisers who worked alongside him.
A sculpture of a Brazilian woman in a simple knee-length dress, gazing out over the city, holding a bottle of misoprostol pills.
Regularly updated bulletin boards listing local abortion providers and sexual health clinics, framed with blooms of tall and fragrant black cohosh.
A sign with QR codes for menstrual apps that won’t sell our data, mounted next to a gigantic motherwort plant, six feet tall and full of spikes.
I imagine memorial benches with nameplates, honouring murdered abortion providers. Blank nameplates for people who were rendered sterile. For those who died. Those at risk after illegal abortions, and the thousands of people burned at the stake for providing birth control.
This, too, is a grieving garden.
Around the perimeter, an intricate pebble mosaic walkway in vivid shades of red and purple, depicting hearts and wombs and shields, in honour of the providers who risk imprisonment, of volunteer escorts, of those who have always fought for safe abortion access.
Pink, yellow and white yarrow blooms throughout. Red raspberry canes laden with fruit each July. At the garden’s entrance, a stone statue of Mary with a soft smile and a snake winding around her bare feet. An apple in its jaws.
[1] I use the terms “pregnant person/people” more frequently than “pregnant women.” This is in recognition that not everyone who becomes pregnant identifies as a woman. I also recognize that misogyny based on the gender binary is very much present in efforts to restrict abortion access. In an effort to encompass these complexities, I sometimes use the terms “pregnant person/people” and sometimes “pregnant women” or “women” depending on context.
[2] Dunphy, Catherine. Morgentaler: A Difficult Hero. Wiley, 2003, p. 77.
[3] Kavattur, Purvaja S, et al. (Somjen Frazer, Abby ElShafei, Kayt Tiskus, Laura Laderman, Lindsey Hull, Fikayo Walter-Johnson, Dana Sussman, and Lynn M. Paltrow) The Rise of Pregnancy Criminalization: A Pregnancy Justice Report, New York: Pregnancy Justice, 2023.