Appendix 3

Doris Power, Just Society Movement, speech given in the Railway Committee Room, on May 9, 1970:

We live in a bureaucratic, impersonal society. While everyone in this society experiences at some time or another the underlaying authoritarianism which is present in most bureaucratic institutions, I feel that I, as a poor person, experience this kind of control over my life in a more openly oppressive way. I cannot consider the question of control of my body and the very personal decision of whether or not to have an abortion outside of any consideration of the fact that I have little control over ANY part of my life.

Let’s get one thing straight. We live in a “man-made” environment and it is in this context that I look at abortion. When society was primarily agricultural, the natural law was the ruling one. But now with our cities and huge bureaucracies that make crucial decisions about how the people in those cities are going to use their time and their space, we have people with money, like developers and slum-landlords, who make decisions about where I am going to live and how I’m going to live—and welfare administrators who decide WHAT I’m going to eat—and corporate executives who decide how clean the air I breathe will be—and unresponsive politicians who decide how many cars will speed past my window in the ghetto as I look at the expressway which public monies have paid for—all this while I go without dentures, bedding, eyeglasses and prescription drugs—because inflation is here and someone up there has decided that an unemployment rate of 10% is “acceptable” and they have to spread the crumbs a little thinner. It is within this context that I look at abortion.

I look at a medical profession that reflects that same man-made environment that can keep people alive who are human vegetables by means of heart-machines, transplants and the like. We no longer have a natural law—we have man-made miracles and we have man-made tragedies.

We’re even at the point of test tube babies.

It’s time to take a new look at death and a new look at birth.

One of the foremost ways of explaining poverty—the poverty which exists all over the world today—is the population explosion. Too many people believe that large families are a cause of poverty, and that a great solution to poverty would be large birth control centres and a lowering of the birth rate. Some people in this, the richest city in Canada, are making a profit out of poverty, others are going hungry, while out west we have farmers who are being paid not to grow wheat. How will the lowering of the birth rate resolve this contradiction?

Contraception IS important, but it cannot be a substitute for social change.

Social change must come and it must eliminate poverty—and it must include a change in the status and role of women.

To show you that I’m not speaking in generalities here—I have experience with illegal abortion. In some of the pamphlets I read that you can obtain a “bad” illegal abortion done by a butcher or quack for as low as $10 and as high as $100. Where for heaven’s sake? For $10 you might get pills and a needle from a doctor, or you might buy a crochet hook, or you could get a healthy supply of clothes hangers to tear your guts apart. The monetary cost of an illegal abortion can run as high as $500 but the psychological cost in inestimable.

The decision to go to a butcher is not born of ignorance, but one of desperation. We know the risks involved, but we have no alternative.

As you can see, I am pregnant. Under our new liberalized abortion laws, I applied for a therapeutic abortion at a Toronto hospital. I was interviewed by two psychiatrists and one medical doctor. The questions I was asked were unrelated to my feelings about this child, the welfare of this child, or indeed the reality of the life this child will face. For instance, I was asked how I got pregnant (my method was terribly unoriginal—it’s thousands of years old). Social or economic factors are not considered—only the mother’s physical and mental health. These doctors are hopelessly ignorant of the pressures and strains involved in maintaining a family on an income lower than the poverty level, and how that affects a mother mentally and the relationships within the family.

When I was refused the abortion, the doctor asked if I would obtain an illegal abortion. I replied that many women did. He then said, “Well, take your rosary and get the Hell out of here.”

One of the questions low-income women are asked when applying for abortions is, “Will you agree to sterilization?” When this question is posed to a woman who feels trapped by an unwanted pregnancy, she is unable to make a rational decision. This places the women who is poor in a double bind, for if she agrees to what is essentially a demand, she has lost all power to make any future decisions over her body. Let me make myself clear—had I agreed to sterilization, I may have been granted an abortion. We are not against sterilization—but it must be available to women on demand—not as a prerequisite to abortion and enforced on a certain class of people. The sale and advertisement of contraceptive devices was a criminal offense until recently. Contraceptives are not widely or freely available to all women.

We have people who oppose birth control, but never question quality of life.

In 1966 in Montreal, a three-year-old child fell to his death through a faulty balcony and his unwed mother took legal action against the landlord. She fought this through to the Appeal Court and lost this case at the end of last year. They based their findings on the fact that the Supreme Court of Canada has consistently held that the natural parent has no right to claim damages arising out of the death of an illegitimate child. Are we all equal in the sight of the law? By even this one case, we see that in Canada a child born out of wedlock is a non-person and does not exist in the eyes of the law. Who are the real bastards? I say they are the people who draft these laws, pass them, and enforce them.

We have people who oppose abortion on the grounds that human life exists from the time of conception. Under Ontario’s welfare legislation a child does not exist until he or she is over 3 months old. This double standard which permeates the morality of our society cannot remain. One of the most painful results of that double standard is the isolation women feel in the face of what is called an illegitimate pregnancy. Women alone are blamed for their pregnancies but men control the circumstances under which they can be terminated.

In the situation of poor families, women are expected to make do with hopelessly inadequate wages or assistance budgets, and then are blamed for their poverty. Who can blame a woman for seeking an abortion under these circumstances? We grind out a subsistence existence, and this society condones that. We, the poor of Canada, are the dirt shoved under the rug of a vicious economy. In obtaining abortion, we pay a price a second time with—OUR LIVES. We can’t afford to fly off to England for a legal, safe abortion. We have to seek out back-street butchers. It’s about time these men in Ottawa who are making $12,000 per year, and $6,000 more tax-free for their expenses, showed a remote sign of concern for us. Their so-called liberalized abortions laws have only succeeded in creating a lot of red-tape and a series of painful experiences for those of us who have to pass through committees which make crucial decisions over our lives. The new laws have also succeeded in tightening up the illegal services, so that it is more and more difficult to obtain any type of abortion. The Just Society Movement demands that all laws pertaining to abortion be repealed. Every pregnant woman, married or single, should be able to obtain an abortion on demand without being compelled to give any reason for her decision. What control can we have over our lives, if we have no control over our own bodies?

Many of the public feel that feminists are man-haters and have a lot of other equally silly notions about the abortion caravan. The Just Society Movement of Toronto recognizes that the liberation of women means the liberation of men—THE LIBERATION OF OUR SOCIETY.

—Doris Power