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/

The past has been marked by periods of acceptance and intolerance of women’s bodily autonomy. Can it offer lessons for today?

By Sophie McBain
March 24, 2025

The medical historian Mary Fissell begins her history of abortion with an account of her visit to a cemetery in south London to see the grave of Eliza Wilson, a 32-year-old dressmaker from Keswick who died in 1848 after an abortion went wrong. Historians have estimated that by the early 19th century, half of births in London were conceived out of wedlock, and that by 1850 rates of illegitimacy were the highest they had ever been. In a big city, filled with young migrant workers, there was clearly a lot of bed-hopping, and plenty of cads who could disappear and evade community pressure to arrange a shotgun wedding. A single woman who found herself pregnant and abandoned, however, had few good options. If she kept the baby, she would likely lose her job and be refused medical care. Places such as London’s Foundling Hospital would not care for babies left anonymously or born out of wedlock, because they did not want to be seen to encourage extramarital relations. Abortion was one solution, and pills were widely available in Victorian Britain and marketed using coded terms such as “female obstruction pills”, the obstruction referring to a delayed period. What made Wilson’s story unusual, then, was not that she had an abortion but that she died from one, after contracting an infection.

Continued: https://www.newstatesman.com/culture/books/book-of-the-day/2025/03/cyclical-history-of-abortion-rights

24.03.2025

self-managed abortions

Listen up, Trumpists – your idea of abortion’s history is all wrong

Mary Fissell’s fascinating book, Abortion: A History, whirls readers from Cicero’s Rome to 16th-century ‘witches’ to modern-day Ireland

Ella Whelan
01 March 2025

“A beautiful thing to watch”: that’s the phrase Donald Trump used to describe the slew of anti-abortion bills passed by American states in 2022, after “Roe v Wade”, a 50-year-old legal judgement in favour of abortion rights, was overturned by the US Supreme Court. While Trump’s personal views on abortion are unknown – over the decades, they’ve swayed with the breeze of whatever has made him popular – his recent words, not to mention the views of his vice-president JD Vance and their evangelical supporters, are the sort you hear described as “from the dark ages”. Abortion-rights activists, in fact, tend to make this kind of distinction: the “pro-choice” movement is progressive and future-oriented, and the “pro-life” (or “anti-choice”) crowd are stuck in the past.

But, according to a new book by the American historian Mary Fissell, the Trumpists’ view of abortion – “heartbeat bills”, no mercy for rape victims, a focus on the “unborn” – isn’t even an accurate representation of the past (whether that past is idolised or despised). In Abortion: A History, she charts a different timeline.

Continued: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/books/non-fiction/review-mary-fissell-abortion-history/

New Zealand – Remembering the lives lost to illegal abortion in NZ

Nov 29, 2024

Before abortion was decriminalised in the late 1970s, generations of New Zealand women had to risk their own lives to terminate a pregnancy.

Some took pills and potions from back-street chemists, others threw themselves down staircases, took rugged horse rides, drank gin in the bath and inserted coat hangers into their vaginas.

Until the 1970s, about 20 women a year died as a result of abortions gone wrong, historian Jock Phillips tells RNZ's Nine to Noon, and this difficult aspect of Aotearoa's history deserves to be better understood.

Continued: https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/national/535258/remembering-the-lives-lost-to-illegal-abortion-in-nz

Dr. Nikki Colodny’s journey from psychotherapy to civil disobedience

Dr. Nikki Colodny took part in the fight to ensure access to safe abortions in Canada in the 1980s. This is the story of how she became involved with the movement and eventually decided to violate Canada’s abortion law.

by Meghan Tibbits-Lamirande
May 7, 2024

At 8:45 a.m. on September 24, 1986, Toronto police knocked on the window of Dr. Nikki Colodny’s vehicle and placed her under arrest. Taking just a moment to pack her knitting and her Holly Near cassette tape, Dr. Colodny went quietly to the courthouse where she was charged, alongside her colleagues Dr. Henry Morgentaler and Dr. Robert Scott, for conspiracy to commit a miscarriage.

Originally trained as a psychotherapist and family physician, Colodny joined the Ontario Coalition for Abortion Clinics (OCAC) as an “envelope licker” in the early 1980s, and eventually trained as an abortion provider at Henry Morgentaler’s clinic in Montreal. From 1986 until the landmark Supreme Court decision R v Morgentaler in January 1988, Colodny provided abortions in contravention of Canadian law.

Continued: https://rabble.ca/feminism/dr-nikki-colodnys-journey-from-psychotherapy-to-civil-disobedience/

“Abortionist”: The Label That Turns Healthcare Workers Into Criminals

The moniker has branded those who help terminate pregnancies as illegitimate, dangerous, and, in turn, allowable targets of violence.

KATIE HERCHENROEDER, Mother Jones
May/June 2024 issue (posted April 15)

In 2007, after Paul Ross Evans pleaded guilty to leaving a bomb outside of a women’s health clinic in Austin, he assured the judge: He never meant for anyone to get hurt. “Except,” he clarified, “for the abortionists.”

For almost two centuries, the moniker “abortionist” has branded those who help terminate pregnancies as illegitimate, dangerous, and, in turn, allowable targets of violence. Before Roe v. Wade, the label turned midwives and doctors into criminals to be cracked down on by the state. After the 1973 decision, right-wing movements continued to deploy the term to imply only back-alley doctors performed abortions.

https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2024/04/abortionist-the-label-that-turns-healthcare-workers-into-criminals/

Library archives uncover long-lost history of Colorado women dying trying to get an abortion before it was legal

By John Daley
Mar. 7, 2024

Abortion access — some states have outlawed it, others have seen scores of patients from out of state — has been in the news since the U.S. Supreme Court repealed the Constitutional right to an abortion two years ago. But looking back through history shows that unplanned pregnancies and access to abortions have been in the news for a long, long time.

More than a century ago, readers of the Rocky Mountain News learned about the death of a young woman who worked in a shop named Maude, who was trying to terminate a pregnancy. A woman named Mrs. Proctor, the wife of the manager of a “remedy company,” was charged with manslaughter in Maude’s death.

Continued: https://www.cpr.org/2024/03/07/denver-public-library-history-of-abortion-access-in-colorado/

Birth Control and Abortion in the Middle Ages

Birth control and abortion did take place in the Middle Ages and, like today, there were many medical and ethical issues that medieval people had to contend with.

Feb 18, 2024
Medievalists.net

In the Middle Ages you will find many opinions about what should or shouldn’t be done when it came to preventing pregnancies. However, the medieval period might be unique in that it is perhaps the only time when you can read the same author in one work condemning the use of birth control and in another giving directions on how to use it.

Religious values held the most important influence on the use of birth control, before and after one conceives. Taking their cue from the Biblical commandment to “Be fruitful, and multiply,” medieval Christianity saw the sole purpose of sex as a means to conceive children. Therefore, the idea that one could use birth control to stop conception was usually harshly condemned (and often equated as being the same as abortion). One ninth-century text, explains, “a woman who has taken a magic potion, however many times she would otherwise have become pregnant and given birth, must recognize herself to be guilty of homicide.”

Continued: https://www.medievalists.net/2024/02/birth-control-abortion-middle-ages/

18.02.2024

Commentary

abortion in the Middle Ages

Birth-Control in the West in the Thirteenth and Early Fourteenth Centuries

concealment of pregnancy

Etienne Van de Walle

history of abortion

history of contraception

infanticide

Leon Battista Alberti

Pete Billar

The Criminalization of Abortion in the West: Its Origins in Medieval Law

Wolfgang Muller

Global

Contraception

The Abortion Provider Who Became the Most Hated Woman in New York

In nineteenth-century New York, abortion was shrouded in secrecy and stigma. But, for Madame Restell, there was no such thing as bad press.

By Moira Donegan
January 17, 2024

She chose the name because it sounded French. When she took out her first newspaper ad, in 1839, she wanted to cultivate an air of mystery and sophistication. In time, her pseudonym, Madame Restell, would be furnished with a backstory for the women who arrived at her office door. The Madame, they were told, had been trained in Europe, at the continent’s famous lying-in maternity hospitals. She’d been taught by her grandmother, a French midwife, and her “preventative powders” had been used in Europe for decades.

None of it was true. The woman her clients knew as Madame Restell had been born Ann Trow, in rural England, grown up in poverty, and never received any formal medical training. But these origins were supposed to be comfortingly credentialled to Restell’s customers, the women who made her into one of the wealthiest—and most notorious—businesswomen in New York City. They came to her seeking abortions.

Continued: https://www.newyorker.com/books/under-review/the-abortion-provider-who-became-the-most-hated-woman-in-new-york

Michiana Chronicles: Ceci n’est plus un cintre – Abortion as a Constitutional Right in France

Anne Magnan-Park focuses on the right to “end pregnancy voluntarily” in France.

WVPE 88.1 Elkhart/South Bend | By Anne Magnan Park
Published January 11, 2024

In her memoir entitled Happening [2], Nobel Prize laureate Annie Ernaux retraces her experience as a 23-year-old promising student. Her narrative focuses on the abortion she received in January 1964, eleven years before abortion became legal in France [3], and during which she almost lost her life. In her memoir, Ernaux draws meticulously from her journals to stay true to the details of her psychological and physical ordeals.

Continued: https://www.wvpe.org/commentary/2024-01-11/michiana-chronicles-ceci-nest-plus-un-cintre-abortion-as-a-constitutional-right-in-france

11.01.2024