A global reminder that the fight for abortion rights is far from over

Women’s right to control our own bodies is not a battle that can be checked off as won

Review by Pamela Cross
October 21, 2025

The A Word: A Global History of the Abortion Struggle, by Elizabeth Casillas and Higinia Garay, University of Regina Press, 2025

The A Word is aptly named. I’m always struck by how, even in Canada, people still feel compelled to whisper when they talk about abortion. It’s a legal medical procedure—we don’t whisper about appendectomies, heart surgery, or root canals. And yet abortion continues to carry, for many, a faint air of impropriety.

I shouldn’t be surprised. In television and film, when a character with no plans for children becomes pregnant, the script rarely includes abortion. Instead, she either miscarries conveniently or turns her life upside down to give birth and, somehow, happily raise a child. Abortion is seldom even mentioned.

Continued: https://canadiandimension.com/articles/view/a-global-reminder-that-the-fight-for-abortion-rights-is-far-from-over

Canada – She Wanted to End Her Pregnancy. Her Abusive Partner Took Her to Court

The legal case that won Canadian women the right to abortion

by Karin Wells
Jun. 4, 2025

They met at a RadioShack in Montreal in November 1988. She was barely twenty, a waitress new to the city. He was five years older, a big man, six foot three, with a moustache. He seemed nice enough.

Chantale Daigle might have been a young, small-town girl—she was from Chibougamau, eight hours north of Montreal—but she knew her own mind. She lived with Jean-Guy Tremblay for five months, and it turned out he was not so nice. She got pregnant. One night, he knocked her to the ground and said that he would “bring her into line once and for all.”

Continued: https://thewalrus.ca/she-wanted-to-end-her-pregnancy-her-abusive-partner-took-her-to-court/

Canada – The fight for reproductive justice is an abolitionist struggle

Review | October 3, 2022
by Maya Campo
Abortion to Abolition: Reproductive Health and Justice in Canada by Martha Paynter (Fernwood, 2022).

With the overturning of Roe v. Wade, reproductive rights are coming under increasing attack. However, the mainstream political discourse about reproductive rights and access to abortion too often narrows this discussion in a way that replicates systemic oppression and white supremacy.

Martha Paynter’s new book, Abortion to Abolition, aims to recentre the discussion around a framework of reproductive justice, which Paynter highlights as being developed by women of colour. Paynter takes an intersectional approach to the abortion rights, presenting case studies that highlight systemic issues of colonialism, homophobia and transphobia, racism, and classism that infringe upon reproductive rights in Canada.

Continued: https://springmag.ca/the-fight-for-reproductive-justice-is-an-abolitionist-struggle