This historic moment was full of emotion. Gathered near the Eiffel Tower to celebrate the enshrinement of the freedom to abort in their Constitution, several hundred French women burst into joy upon the adoption of this emblematic legislative reform. The symbol was powerful, beyond the borders of France, four days before March 8. A very first constitutional guarantee in the world. A new important milestone in this long, unfinished, always precarious struggle towards equality and full freedom for women.
Because if the parliamentarians of France have chosen to guarantee their fellow citizens this freedom to have recourse to a voluntary termination of pregnancy, it is because this right is still not acquired on a global scale. And that it is even more and more threatened where it has been proclaimed.
The invalidation of the judgment Roe v. Wade in the United States, a little less than two years ago, has continued to produce babies. From the south to the north of the country, access to abortion, now left to the states, has been restricted or completely withdrawn. With threats to freedoms occurring — strategically — gradually and successively, “pro-life” groups now have contraception and assisted procreation in their sights. The Alabama Supreme Court has just granted embryos preserved by freezing the status of “unborn child”. In the hours that followed, fertility clinics suspended in vitro fertilization treatments.
In Missouri, a Democratic representative, Ashley Aune, is leading without much hope a fight that should not even be necessary: she wants to change a law preventing, in fact, pregnant women from getting divorced – the judges prefer to wait for a birth and supervise the possible custody of a child before concluding the divorce procedure.
All this may seem distant. After all, the Supreme Court of Canada determined in the Morgentaler decision that the country’s Constitution protected access to abortion. But this right, although recognized, does not guarantee that Canadian women can easily exercise it. In Outaouais, there is only one clinic for the fourth largest city in Quebec and its entire region.
The crusade of the American anti-abortion movement is not confined to the borders of the United States. A “pro-life” group circulated a survey this winter in Alberta suggesting that “parental consent”, a new cabal of these activists, also be considered before a minor is authorized to have an abortion. The province’s health minister, Adriana LaGrange, was herself the head of an anti-abortion organization. It would be illusory to still believe that opponents of abortion are confined to the margins of political action and society.
Dismay falls on Quebec at the alarming rate of marital murders. Four women have already been murdered this year, in the space of just over two months.
The creation of a coercive control offense in the Criminal Code, in order to protect victims, has reached consensus among the organizations that work to defend them, as well as in Quebec. The Ministers of Justice and the Status of Women, Simon Jolin-Barrette and Martin Biron, called on Ottawa to act in this direction in a letter including The duty got a copy.
The Federal Ombudsman for Victims of Crime made the same request, as did the Association of Chiefs of Police. That Justin Trudeau’s government is studying a New Democratic bill along these lines in a parliamentary committee is encouraging. But in a minority political context, time is running out for these women who find themselves under the yoke of a controlling, potentially violent spouse.
The sordid affair of the gang rape allegedly committed by junior hockey players in 2018 will also have dealt a brutal blow to victims of sexual assault. The sporting careers of young boys still take precedence – for Hockey Canada, as demonstrated by its secret funds of millions of dollars intended to stifle such allegations – over the justice to which the alleged victims should be entitled.
It took too many years for formal charges to be filed last month. London Police Chief Thai Truong had the decency to recognize this. Its service exceeds the already troubling national average of sexual assault cases unclassified by police forces.
But Chief Truong’s dignity stopped there, the new police boss having in the same breath suggested that the representation of young women and girls “on television, in music videos, […] photos in magazines all contribute to sexual violence and [sa] normalization”. Comments made in the most serious way. Not in a theocratic country, but in Ontario. And not in 1954, in 2024.
The last year will have served as a poignant reminder. Women’s victories are not immune to setbacks. The fight is not over. In places, and for all of them, it will now even have to start again.