Rachael Johnstone's After Morgentaler: The Politics of Abortion in Canada offers an updated and refreshing look at the contemporary landscape of abortion politics in Canada, an area that has long been at the margins of Canadian political science. While many Canadians might consider the debate over abortion to be done and dusted, Johnstone's book provides an important reminder that abortion remains an essentially contested and ever-present political issue, particularly at the provincial and activist levels.
While 2018 marked the thirtieth anniversary of the Morgentaler decision in Canada—the Supreme Court decision that struck down Canada's existing abortion laws as unconstitutional—Johnstone convincingly demonstrates that the court's decision did not result in equally available abortion care across Canada. Rather, abortion provision remains largely located in urban areas. Women and trans men in New Brunswick, Prince Edward Island and Nova Scotia, as well as in rural and Indigenous communities, still face barriers in accessing abortion care. And Canadian medical schools offer no formalized training around abortion care, raising concerns over the future of abortion provision in Canada.
It is this gap between “law” and “access” that provides Johnstone with her starting point. She argues that in order to understand the complexity and nuance of abortion politics and access in Canada, one must explore the complex networks of regulations that govern abortion access within, outside and between provinces. In Johnstone's words, “deeply held convictions of individual politicians, interventions by the federal government, and the nature of relationships between provincial legislatures and the courts all offer partial explanations for disparities in the treatment of abortion access across Canada” (81). It is only once these partial explanations are patched together that we can really understand the reality of the legality and accessibility of abortion care in Canada.
Johnstone carefully traces this argument throughout her book, examining the role that social movement activists (chapters 1 and 5), federal governments and the Supreme Court (chapter 2), the provinces (chapter 3) and the medical profession (chapter 4) have come to play in structuring and shaping the landscape of abortion access across the country. Perhaps Johnstone's most convincing claim is that the contemporary terrain of abortion politics in Canada is the result of both action and inaction on the part of state and non-state actors alike. For instance, dominant norms in federal party politics have meant that there is a long tradition of politicians, even social conservatives, trying to avoid the abortion issue altogether. This, in part, allowed abortion providers and the larger medical profession to capitalize on state inaction and, as a result, work to expand access through the courts.
However, Johnstone is quick to remind us that while both the medical profession and the courts helped expand the legality and accessibility of abortion care in Canada, it also has had “the troubling side effect of effectively absolving the House of its responsibility to actively participate in safeguarding women's constitutional rights” (52). Johnstone is careful to stress that without formal recognition of a positive right to abortion by the federal government, access to abortion care will always remain vulnerable.
This book updates an aging literature on abortion politics in Canada. Both its structure and writing style are clear and engaging, and After Morgentaler will no doubt be instructive for scholars and students interested in abortion politics and in Canadian politics more generally. Additionally, it might be informative to those interested in larger questions involving health care, judicial politics, the strategic mobilization of social movements and questions of the federal division of power in Canada.
Given that abortion politics are ever changing and that abortion remains an essentially contested issue, After Morgentaler, in some respects, raises as many questions as it answers. For example, innovative reproductive technologies, such as increasingly sophisticated ultrasounds, are sure to change the parameters and contours of both state and non-state approaches to the abortion issue, something largely absent from Johnstone's account. In particular, within the post-Morgentaler context, there has emerged an increasingly pertinent discussion surrounding the self-management of abortion, especially given the relatively recently approved “abortion pill” (mifepristone) in 2015. Thirty years later after Morgentaler, then, and with a plethora of new media and pharmaceutical technologies at our disposal, how do we reassess what women need from abortion legislation, technology, care, access and reproductive justice, while respecting the specific conditions within which abortion is sought? And perhaps more importantly, how might these new conversations transform the ways that abortion politics and provision are negotiated in Canada in the future? While providing a detailed and compelling account of the developments shaping abortion politics in Canada before and after Morgentaler, Johnstone's book raises important questions about where the abortion debate is headed over the next 30 years.
