Gender, Health, and Popular Culture: Historical Perspectives

All Aboard? Canadian Women’s Abortion Tourism, 1960–1980

All Aboard? Canadian Women’s Abortion Tourism, 1960–1980 Christabelle Sethna C hanging Places (1975), David Lodge’s witty satire of Anglo-American academic life in the 1960s, begins with the startling discovery that Morris Zapp, an esteemed American professor, is the sole male passenger on a packed flight to London. When Zapp learns that all the women on board are heading to the English capital for abortions, his pregnant seatmate, a young, single university student, casually informs him of the package deal she has negotiated: “round trip, surgeon’s fee, five days’ nursing with private room and excursion to Stratford-upon-Avon.”1 In this work of fiction, the punchline sends up what has come to be known as “abortion tourism.” Arguably an insensitive term that has anti-abortion connotations,2 abortion tourism is the generic catchphrase for the very real travel women undertake to access abortion services. Travel is one of the central barriers to abortion access: the further a woman has to travel for an abortion, the less likely she is to obtain one and the more likely she is to be young and underprivileged.3 Yet abortion tourism persists. It is most familiar to Ireland, where abortion is predominantly illegal. Every year, thousands of Irish women leave to seek legal abortion services in England.4 Often conducted over a long range and across domestic and international borders, abortion tourism remains such a commonplace transnational occurrence that it is documented in academic literature as well as in popular culture productions such as novels, short stories, poems, songs, and cartoons.5 Canada has its own little-known history of abortion tourism. Canadian scholars studying abortion have concentrated on analyzing the changes to 89 The Transmission of Health Information 90 the status of abortion in the country’s Criminal Code.6 Although compelling evidence indicates that many Canadian women coped with these changes by travelling to access abortion services before and after abortion was legalized in 1969, the topic of abortion tourism remains seriously under-investigated in Canada.7 This chapter focuses on contemporaneous real-life accounts of Canadian women who travelled domestically and internationally for illegal and legal abortions between 1960 and 1980. These accounts appeared in the university student press, mainstream publications, women’s magazines, and government-commissioned reports. Cultural productions of abortion tourism were often infused with humour, irony, sadness, or regret. Reallife accounts, which dramatized the Byzantine lengths women journeyed to procure an abortion, were laced with indignation. Bringing women’s forced flights to public light provided different constituencies of readers with valuable information on circumventing abortion laws; detailed the consequent financial, emotional, and physical risks involved; and troubled the concept of abortion tourism itself. Indeed, real-life accounts of Canadian women’s abortion tourism constructed abortion laws as a “carceral space” within which pregnant women seeking abortion were monitored, disciplined, and punished jurisdictionally but from which only the privileged few could escape geographically.8 Abortion and Contraception in Canadian History The criminalization of birth control in Canada stretches back to the late nineteenth century, when eugenic thought was prevalent. Canadian legislators fearing the prospect of “race suicide” sought to increase the number of offspring born to Anglo-Saxon Christian women.9 They looked to the example of restrictive British and American birth control laws to prohibit, through the Criminal Code, the sale, advertisement, and distribution of contraceptives and abortifacients. A woman who procured her own abortion couldbesentencedtouptosevenyearsincarceration.Abortionproviders,who were trained medical or non-medical personnel, were liable to the maximum penalty of life imprisonment.10 Although suspected abortion providers were rarely tried, guilty verdicts were reached in nearly half the cases before the courts.11 There was a “good faith” provision that allowed for an abortion to save the life of the mother. This provision eventually led some non-Catholic hospitals in the 1960s to establish therapeutic abortion committees (TACs) composed of physicians who determined whether an abortion was necessary on a case-by-case basis. Still, the possibility of prosecution meant that many doctors refused to perform abortions at all.12 All Aboard? Christabelle Sethna 91 Despite its illegality, Canadian women, whether married or single, continued to turn to abortion.Some tried to self-abort by injuring themselves, by ingesting traditional remedies such as pennyroyal, or by introducing slippery elm bark, needles, or hooks into their uteri. Others consumed quack potions or pills advertised for sale as menstrual regulators. Finally...