Image: Pro-Choice Demonstrators in Toronto, Ontario, 1981, 10-001-S3-I141.
Reproductive justice is about having complete control over the decisions we make about our reproductive and sexual well-being and is foundational to gender equality. The term, coined by the Women of African Descent for Reproductive Justice in 1994, joins together the terms and concepts of “reproductive rights” and “social justice”. Its intersectional framework furthered previous decades’ more limited debates around abortion and pro-choice issues by considering how sexism, racism, homophobia, and other social factors impact access to quality healthcare.
“Reproductive Justice is Essential to Gender Justice”
- Paulette Senior, Canadian Women’s Foundation President
Reproductive Justice encompasses every individual’s right to make their own choices about their reproductive lives and to access reproductive health services. Moreover, it entails the right to raise children in safe and healthy environments. Reproductive justice also encompasses the social, economic, and political conditions that enable individuals to parent with dignity.
Using select records and items from the late 1960s to the early 1990s held at the University of Ottawa Library’s Archives and Special Collections, this exhibit offers an introduction to select topics in the evolving history of reproductive justice in Canada.
For a more thorough examination of the ways in which privilege and oppression intersect in the history of Canadian women’s healthcare, see our suggested list of additional resources at the end of this exhibit.
Image (Right): Photograph of clinic [Winnipeg, Manitoba Women's Health Clinic] ca. 1992, 10-051-S1-F36-I2.
This digital exhibit, as well as the exhibit onsite at the Archives and Special Collections, contains subject matter that may be triggering to some users. In order to address women’s health as well as the impact and legacies of racism, homophobia, ableism and colonialism, the exhibit includes discussion of forced or coerced sterilization, homophobia, and racism. The exhibit also makes mention of miscarriage.
Contraception
From pre-colonial history until today, women in Canada and within Indigenous and Inuit territories, have practiced contraception as a means of exercising control over their bodies, determining the number and spacing of their children, and exercising choice in their sexual practices within or outside of marriage.
Photograph from Giving Birth is Just the Beginning, by Judith Lermer Crawley, [1976-1987], 10-139-S1-SS4-F13-I1.
Throughout history, however, cultural, religious and societal norms have made women’s contraception rights illegal, dangerous, or taboo. Canada’s 1892 Criminal Code made the sale and advertising of contraceptive devices illegal, though women continued to practice contraception by natural methods or by accessing early devices, sometimes endangering their health and risking negative social repercussions.
Image (Left) Margaret Sanger, American birth control activist before a Brooklyn courthouse in 1917, convicted of opening a birth control clinic in New York. From Wikimedia Commons.
The first birth control clinic in Canada was opened in 1932 in Hamilton, Ontario, and prior to that, a birth control program was operated by A.R. Kaufman, beginning in 1930. Early 20th century feminists from elite and Protestant anglophone classes were among the first volunteers for birth control organizations operating in Canadian cities between the 1930s-1950s. While suffragette activists advocated for women’s reproductive rights, many of them held views rooted in racist and eugenic ideologies, discussed in detail further below. Historical records that valorize the suffragettes sometimes fail to address how eugenics theories informed the early development of the birth control movement in Canada.
Image (Left): Canada's First Birth Control Clinic, plaque at Ferguson Station, Hamilton, Ontario, 2007 (photograph), Wikimedia Commons.
By the mid-20th century, support for the contraceptive movement continued to grow in Canada, due in part to the post- World War II baby boom, as well as to the increased availability of the birth control pill. Canada developed its own branch of the International Planned Parenthood Federation (IPPF) in 1963, and clinicians sometimes taught contraception along with sexual health education in schools.
Unmarried women and those belonging to particular religious organizations, such as the Catholic Church, were still limited in their ability to practice contraception or to access birth control methods without fear of judgement. Contraception was formally legalized in the 1969 Omnibus Bill, though married women from more privileged demographics and from specific religious affiliations still had far greater access to contraceptive methods.
Five samples of birth control pills, by Henri Robideau, [ca. 1980s], 10-093-S6-F80-I3.
In the 1970s, decriminalization of contraception led to an increase in the number of organizations and services promoting access to birth control and family planning for everyone. Planning services were set up in hospitals and sexual education programs were created in high schools, colleges and universities. Birth control was becoming an integral part of public health and an inseparable component of sexual education. Women in Canada increasingly exercised their right to choose the number and spacing of their children, if any, within or outside of marriage.
Women at this time expressed concern, however, for how developments in contraception technologies had also led to the exploitation of women and they pointed to potential negative long-term side effects of the birth control pill. Women's health collectives as well as committees formed to discuss these issues; The Abortion and Contraception Committee of Toronto hosted a conference in 1975 and 1976, "The Politics of Contraception," discussing both the science of birth control and ethical questions relating to their testing and use in developing countries.
Eugenics
Eugenics is based on now discredited and scientifically inaccurate racist, ableist, and colonialist ideologies, which suppose that to improve humanity, reproduction must be controlled and restricted to certain segments of the population. The Eugenics movement, prevalent in Canada from the late 19th century until the 1960s, was a powerful force in shaping early iterations of feminist politics. Such politics were often exclusionary and demanded equality only for white, middle-class women. Women fighting for true reproductive justice in Canada have had to struggle against this legacy.
The early suffragette movement in Canada, as elsewhere, discouraged reproduction among lower income and immigrant women and encouraged procreation among more privileged members of society. Debates over what made for the “healthiest” babies and ideals of motherhood were not only concerned with reducing high-infant mortality rates but also with controlling and restricting reproduction in accordance with upper- to middle- class anglophone Protestant ideologies.
Coerced and forced sterilization were employed to prevent reproduction entirely, or to reduce supposedly “undesirable” traits. Although eugenics theories have now been widely discredited, the legacy of eugenics continues; forced sterilization was prevalent until the early 1970s, and impacted thousands of Canadian women subjected to compulsory infertility as a result of their race, class, or perceived disabilities. Early eugenics theories continue to influence practices and beliefs surrounding women's health care today, including pre-natal genetic screening and other NRTs, which are discussed below.
As records in the archives demonstrate, de-criminalization of contraception and its normalization in society have at times supported and contributed to exploitive and patriarchal power structures, often with the support of women. More radical and socialist-identifying feminists of the late 1960s and early 1970s linked sexual liberation to class and political struggles to raise awareness about the potentially exploitative, patriarchal, and racist use of contraceptive technologies.
Image (Left) Poster for the International Day of Action for Contraception, Abortion and No Forced Sterilization, 1973, 10-001-S5-I155. Women in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan against exploitative and unethical uses of contraception.
Sexual Health Education
Perspectives on sex education have evolved over time. Whether they result from the liberation of morals and sexual liberation, or regress as a result of lessening human rights, sex education is a social construct that is organized differently according to historical, political, and cultural contexts (Charmillot et al., 2021).
In Canada, sex education in state-run educational institutions developed in the late nineteenth century. Sex education was provided in the home and later in schools, and instruction typically included information about reproduction, venereal disease, and the distinction between so-called "normal and abnormal" sexual practices, with an emphasis on controlling the sexual behaviour of young people (C. S. Sethna, 2004). In the early twentieth century, forms of sex education for youth often took the form of what was called "purity education" or "nature study" (C. Sethna, 2010).
During the 1960s and 1970s, few students received sexual health education. If education was provided at all, it was through family life education programs focusing primarily on human reproduction, puberty, and in some cases, birth control.
However, the 1960s to 1980s, known as the "sexual liberation years," gradually made a break with the past as Canadians started to link sex education with feminist demands for abortion and contraception, and reflected positive public discourse on non-reproductive sexuality.
In 1964, the Sex Information and Education Council of Canada (SIECCAN)—a non-profit charitable organization—was created "to collect and evaluate existing information on sexual behaviour, to initiate research on sexual behaviour, and to make information on sexual behaviour available to individuals and organizations upon request."
Image (Left): SIECCAN Toronto, Fact Sheet, 1973, 10-001-S1-F3085. SIECCAN is still in existence today, and works with educators, health professionals, community organizations, governments and other partners to promote Canadians' sexual and reproductive health. One of SIECCAN's main goals is to increase the capacity of educators and institutions to deliver education and health care in Canada and to provide comprehensive sexual health education (About SIECCAN - Sieccan, 2018).
The concept of sexual health also emerged in the early 1970s as part of the World Health Organization’s (WHO) goal of defining sexual health in relation to healthcare, well-being, pleasure, and respect for others. WHO proposed in 1975 that "Sexual health is the integration of the somatic, emotional, intellectual and social aspects of being sexual, in a way that is positively enriching and enhances personality, communication and love. The right to sexual information and the right to pleasure are fundamental elements of this concept."
As society became more open about sexuality, support for sex education in schools also increased. Family planning began to be integrated into the human rights narrative, and the notion of "sexual rights" emerged.
Beginning in the 1980s, sexual health and sexual rights were incorporated within education systems. By the mid-1990s, every province and territory in Canada either mandated or strongly recommended that some form of sexuality education be taught in schools. Concern about HIV/AIDS and high rates of sexually transmitted infections (STIs) among young people prompted changes in sex education services, especially in secondary schools, to address the prevention and treatment of STIs.
Canadian governments are now obligated to respect all individuals’ rights to health, well-being and equality, which requires the provision of unbiased and scientifically accurate sex education. In 1994, the Public Health Agency of Canada published the Canadian Guidelines for Sexual Health Education to provide guidance and unity to professionals providing sexual health education in Canada.
The Guidelines have been periodically reissued, most recently in 2008. Sexual health education is now at the intersection of educational, health and social science fields. Sexual health education is both a social education and an anatomical/physiological education that aims to promote sexual health, though concerns persist that the needs of 2SLGBTQ+ youth and youth with disabilities are not being adequately met by today's sexual education curricula (Wells, 2009).
Image (L): Information sheet from self-help workshops on vaginal and cervical health, 1984, 10-035-S1-F4-I1.
Abortion
Despite the incorporation of sexual education within Canadian curricula, a 2017 study by the Abortion Rights Coalition of Canada, found most schools fail to significantly address, or mention, abortion—a key component of women’s reproductive rights. Abortion, which involves the termination of a woman’s pregnancy before 20 weeks’ gestation, is currently legal in Canada and publicly funded under the federal Canada Health Act. Abortion rights were only obtained in recent decades, and provision of services are still limited by region.
The history of abortion rights in Canada demonstrates the reluctance of government to create accessible abortion services for women across varying demographics and shows how women have obtained these rights sometimes through radical and/or illegal actions. It is important to note, however, that relatively little is known of abortion history or attitudes to abortion as potentially practiced by Indigenous and Innu societies or in the first centuries of European colonization in Canada.
Canada’s Criminal Code formally made abortion illegal in 1869. This legislation would prevail until the Supreme Court ruling of R. v. Morgentaler in 1988.
Despite the enactment of the Criminal Code, women risked their lives to undergo abortions, often performed by unqualified individuals in unsafe conditions. Qualified health professionals also performed abortions at the risk of imprisonment, including physician Emily Howard Stowe in 1879, followed much later by Dr. Morgentaler in 1969.
The exact numbers of women who died undergoing illegal abortions in Canada is unknown; estimates vary widely according to sources and authors. However, by the mid-20th century, society was beginning to more openly discuss illegal abortions as a national health issue that needed to be comprehensively addressed. The Canadian Medical Association discussed abortion law reform in the 1950s and its Maternal Welfare Committee studied maternal health and mortality in relation to abortion.
Image (Left) Newsclipping from the Canadian Abortion Rights Action League, 1983, 10-001-S1-F300. A number of abortion clinics operated illegally in Canadian cities, some of which provided safe abortions, inciting both support and vehement opposition.
Mid-20th century Canada legislation failed to reflect the values of many Canadians. Women unable to care for or bear children were willing to risk their lives to terminate pregnancies that would otherwise radically alter or limit their health and life choices. Even after the passage of the 1969 Omnibus Bill, abortion was only legal where the mother's health was deemed endangered by the pregnancy, as determined by a committee of mostly male therapeutic abortion doctors.
In 1970, The Vancouver Women’s Caucus formed an Abortion Caravan, travelling across Canada and drawing hundreds of supporters on its journey from Vancouver to Ottawa to disrupt Parliamentary proceedings and raise awareness of the need for major legislative reform.
The Caravan attached coat hangers to a coffin, representing all those who had died undergoing dangerous underground abortions. The Vancouver Women’s Caucus, as well as other abortion rights groups, originated in the New Left student groups that viewed women’s liberation as part of a larger socialist movement, encompassing women’s right to jurisdiction over their own bodies.
Image (Left): Page from a Retrospective Calendar on the Women's Movement in Vancouver, [1972-1975], 10-034-S2-F17. For more information on the pro-choice movement in Canada, click this exhibit link.
During the 1970s and 1980s, activist organizations continued to lobby to abolish the abortion law, including the Canadian Association for the Repeal of the Abortion Law (CARAL), which organized to defend Dr. Henry Morgentaler for his provision of safe abortion services in illegal clinics across the country.
The 1988 Supreme Court ruling in the Dr. Henry Morgentaler case struck down the antiquated abortion law, but women continue to experience limited access to safe and affordable abortions. The 2013 study by Sethna and Doull revealed the paucity of services for women outside of major urban environments in Canada. The study also highlights how women from rural communities, and especially those from Indigenous and Metis groups, are disproportionately impacted by lack of access to abortion clinics.
The recent overturning of Roe v. Wade in the United States, as well as Canada’s own Parliamentary attempts to curb abortion rights—including the 1990 attempt to re-criminalize abortion—demonstrate the fallibility of abortion legislation in North America and exemplify the government's general resistance to guaranteeing women’s control over their bodies and reproductive processes.
Image (Left): Two individuals working on the vandalized Morgentaler Clinic plaque [at the Canadian Women's Movement Archives], 1989, 10-001-S3-I1023. Morgentaler's clinics were targets of vandal and fire bomb attacks in the late 1980s and early 1990s.
Lesbian Mothers and Child Custody
Over time, feminists in Canada have developed understanding of reproductive justice not just as the right to choose to not have children, but the right to have the children one wants and to raise them in a safe and healthy environment. While lesbian mothers have historically been excluded from conversations surrounding reproductive justice, choices about when and how to raise children have always been profoundly relevant for same-sex couples.
Even after the radical reproductive renaissance of the 1960s, women were forced to deny their lesbianism in front of the courts in order to retain custody due to 20th century legal procedures that weighed heavily on judge’s subjective assessments of “unfit mothers" and “immoral behaviours.” Many lesbian mothers were forced to choose between living authentically or retaining custody of their children. From the 1970s until the early 1990s, activists and advocacy organizations including The Committee to Protect Lesbian Rights, The Feminist Lesbian Action Group, and Wages Due Lesbians argued that judges assumed harmful outcomes for children based on stereotypical notions about lesbianism and lesbian relationships.
Image (L) Notice for a support benefit for a lesbian mother fighting for custody of her children, 1976, 10-027-S1-F9-I1.
In the mid-1970s, Wages Due Lesbians initiated a project called the Lesbian Mothers Defence Fund. In addition to raising money for lesbian mothers’ custody battles, the LMDF collected records of court cases where lesbian mothers either lost custody of their children or were granted custody only if they agreed to live separately from their female partners.
In a 1978 article submitted to the magazine Fireweed, LMDF member Ellen Agger emphasized the difficulties lesbian mothers faced due not only to their sexuality, but also as a result of economic discrimination against women, noting that “one lesbian mother in Toronto recently faced eviction from public housing because lesbians are not allowed to co-habit." Agger also observed that “women -- who can never compete ‘equally’ with men’s wages – are losing custody because we are less able to provide for the children. Our emotional and physical contribution in the home of raising those children is not considered financially.” In other words, even though mothers were held responsible for the unpaid labour of raising children, systemic discrimination forced women to rely on men for financial security and thus prevented them from leaving or divorcing their husbands.
Image (Left): Protesters marching with a banner for Lesbian Mother's Defence Fund, ca. 1980s, 10-031-S3-F6-I5.
In October 1976, Wages Due Lesbians showed their support for all single mothers when they occupied Nellie’s Women’s Hostel to demand increased funding for shelters housing battered women and transient women, many of whom were living in poverty after leaving their male partners. They ended their occupation after receiving $7,000 from the City of Toronto, and a one-year grant from the federal government which would allow Nellie’s to hire more staff. While they were unable to secure a permanent increase in funding for all Toronto women’s shelters, Wages Due Lesbians continued to organize around economic discrimination against women, which they viewed as inherently connected to their freedom to live as lesbian mothers.
In 1977, Wages Due Lesbians and the Lesbian Mothers Defence Fund co-published Francie Wyland’s “Motherhood, Lesbianism, and Child Custody,” one of the first pamphlets in North America that addressed the topic of lesbian motherhood and custody rights. In addition to helping lesbian mothers understand how to retain custody of their children, Wyland states emphatically that “We are no longer accepting that to have children we must serve and depend on a man, nor that we must hide our lesbianism as a condition for keeping our children... we will apologize to no one for rearing children who are – like their mothers – making a ferocious fight for the power to determine their own lives.”
In the late 1970s and throughout the 1980s, The Lesbian Mothers Defence Fund worked with the Women’s Counselling and Education Centre to provide lesbian mothers with referrals for equity-seeking therapists and psychiatrists that could serve as expert witnesses in court; these witnesses were able to testify that lesbianism did not, in fact, harm children or inhibit their development. The fund also granted access to sympathetic lawyers, and a growing number of legal documents on lesbian mothers’ custody battles. As Wyland explained in an interview with the magazine The Grapevine, “I didn’t want my own openness and mobility to be conditional on not having a child. And I thought if we could do away with some of the obstacles that keep lesbian mothers from being able to be open, then I would have a freer set of choices. And so would my friends.”
Image (Left): Benefit in aid of Lesbian Mothers Defense Fund, 1978-1982, 10-031-S3-F1.
You can visit the Canadian Women’s Movement Archives to learn more about lesbians’ fight for reproductive justice and listen to audio-cassette recordings of "lesbian mothers,” a panel on motherhood, lesbianism, and child custody sponsored by the Feminist Lesbian Action Group in February 1979. You may also consult a transcript for the panel’s introduction [10-001-S1-F897]. In the late 1980s and 1990s, lesbian mothers had to fight once again for access to New Reproductive Technologies such as artificial insemination, which were sometimes denied to them as a result of doctors’ regressive views on same-sex relationships.
New Reproductive Technologies
The central focus of the feminist movement on reproductive choice shifted in the 1980s and 1990s to include New Reproductive Technologies (NRTs), which both assisted conception and manipulated genetics. Since the birth of the first test tube baby in 1978, NRTs proliferated rapidly in an unregulated environment and feminist groups raised concerns about how these technologies impacted women’s rights and control over reproductive decision-making.
In the late 1980s, Canadians were increasingly concerned about the impact of in-vitro fertilization and other rapidly advancing reproductive technologies. In 1989, the Royal Commission on New Reproductive Technologies was created under the Brian Mulroney government to study the ethical, social, research, and legal implications of new reproductive technologies in Canada. Many feminist organizations prepared briefs to the Commission which presented feminist alternative policy frameworks and raised concerns about the lack of regulation for NRTs.
CRIAW study, Our Bodies...Our Babies?, 1989, 10-042-S20-F69.
The Canadian Research Institute for the Advancement of Women (CRIAW) supported, commissioned, and conducted a wide range of research projects that addressed the experience of women in Canada, including the introduction of NRTs. One notable project was the CRIAW’s Community Resource Kit on new reproductive technologies, which was used by many other organizations that prepared briefs for the Royal Commission on New Reproductive Technologies (1988-1990). The need for a community resource kit on NRTs was first identified at a CRIAW workshop on Feminist Ethics held in Montreal in March 1987. After reviewing the Commission report in 1995, the Government put a moratorium on NRTs until the Assisted Human Reproduction Act passed in 2004.
The CRIAW Resource Kit, Our Bodies... Our Babies? Community Resource Kit on New Reproductive Technologies, 1989, (10-042-S20-F69), contains fact sheets on infertility and sterility, surrogacy, sex selection and gene manipulation, and in vitro fertilization. It includes articles and an educational component on how women can become further involved. The project was coordinated by Lise Martin, written by Janis Wood Catano, Health Education Consultant, under the direction of the CRIAW working group on New Reproductive Technologies (NRTs): Monique Bégin, Linda Christiansen-Ruffman, Linda Clippingdale, Lise Martin, Christine St. Peter.
During this time, feminists argued that new reproductive technologies, and technology in general, are shaped by power relationships and social values that further promote imbalances based on sex, economics, race, ability, sexuality, etc. These imbalances determine the possibilities people have for individual choice of when, or how, to conceive a child. In other words, due to systemic inequalities in training and education, men are often viewed as the ones designing the technology, while women are viewed as the passive recipients of technological innovations. These innovations did not consider women’s needs and preferences, potentially leading to harmful effects on health and autonomy (Cox, p 86). Feminists questioned the techniques of NRTs, the ‘problem’ of infertility, and the necessity of ‘medical’ solutions.
Discussions surrounding NRTS were further advanced in a document created by DisAbled Women's Network (DAWN) Canada and the National Action Committee on the Status of Women (NAC) that can be found in the Archives and Special Collections. In The Contradictions of Choice: The Common Ground Between Disability Rights and Feminist Analyses (June 1995), DAWN argues that the NRTS and medical technologies have appropriated women’s roles and bodies. They note that infertility, or the absence of insemination, is now treated as a sickness that must be cured–greatly to the benefit of pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies. Feminists argue that health care practitioners should instead examine the causes of infertility.
The report also notes that women are excluded from the policy and decision-making processes related to the development of NRTs, and their bodies have been systematically appropriated as experimental labs. DAWN and NAC argue that, in this context, women's opportunity to make informed reproductive choices is severely compromised. DAWN also argues that some NRTs, like prenatal screening, can perpetuate disability-based discrimination through eugenicist ideologies that screened for “undesirable” traits and sought to produce “ideal” children. According to DAWN, such technologies restrict women's choice to have a child with a disability and perpetuate the idea that "imperfections” should be eradicated from populations.
Image (Left): Pamphlet on a public forum organized by the Royal Commission on NRTs, 1990, 10-057-S8-F36.
Other feminist groups in Canada also investigated NRTs: The National Association of Women and the Law, whose records are held at ARCS, carefully examines many aspects of human reproduction and their implication on women’s human rights. In several documents, including The Assisted Human Reproductive Act: Regulations OF or FOR Women’s Equality (2004), NAWL argues for a feminist analysis of NRT legislation since legislation dis-proportionally impacts women and could impact women's equality rights.
In NAWL's paper, Can Poststructuralist Theory Help Us Discover a Feminist Method for Creating Laws? (10-036-S5-F174), (1993), Fay Faraday notes that debates about NRTs should analyze power relationships and question assumptions about sexuality, encouraging an empowering definitions of female sexuality. NRTs have the potential to help women redefine their relationships to their bodies and establish new patterns of social interactions. Feminist law-makers must analyze what power relations would flow from proposed legislation and must evaluate whether these relations promote or inhibit women's autonomy (Faraday, p.47).
Environmental Justice
Beyond defending access to reproductive health care, fighting for the right to choose abortion, and struggling to influence the development of new reproductive technologies, women activists in Canada connected reproductive rights with environmental justice by endorsing nuclear disarmament and the regulation of pesticides, citing negative effects on women’s reproductive health.
In 1979, the National Action Committee on the Status of Women (NAC) convened a three-part conference on “Feminist Visions of the Future,” the first of which focused on the environment. At this conference, women attended to the fact that radiation from nuclear waste had been found to cause many types of cancer and birth defects, and questioned lack of funding provided for renewable, non-polluting sources of energy. Likewise, the Voice of Women Nuclear Committee argued that Canada’s manufacture of nuclear reactors had not been adequately debated or explained to the public. After the U.S. bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945, women around the world learned how radiation could affect the health of several generations.
Image (Left): Two protesters against missile cruise testing (with their pet), 10-114-S2-F13-I6.
In their ongoing struggle to “plan the future as if women mattered,” feminists and members of the public also sought increased regulation of uranium mining. For example, the NAC file on “Feminist Visions of the Future” features an article from 1978 about a five-week blockade in Genelle, British Columbia. During this time, residents held a 24 hr/day picket line to prevent uranium mining near the Kootenay River watershed. Genelle resident Patty Palmer was quoted saying that “I guess it’s breaking the law, but I never considered it that when you’re fighting for your life and your kids and your land.” Since then, numerous studies have demonstrated increased risk of cancer and birth defects for women living or working near uranium mines.
In the mid-1990s, the Women’s Network for Health and the Environment (WNH&E) sought to “make connections between deteriorating health, including such diseases as breast cancer and endometriosis, and environmental degradation," and committed themselves to “collaborate with women most directly affected by environmental degradation, such as farmers and the workers in manufacturing, chemical, and nuclear industries, as well as marginalized communities, including aboriginal peoples, women of colour, poor women, lesbians, and others.” This statement demonstrates emerging recognition of the entanglement between reproductive rights and other forms of oppression based on race, class, and sexuality. Similarly, the WNH&E’s statement highlights companies’ tendency to concentrate pollutants in Indigenous communities, low-income communities, and communities of colour, who are less likely to garner the attention and resources necessary for fighting back
Image (Left) Men, Women and the Fertility Gamble, by the Canadian Advisory Council on the Status of Women, warning of reproductive hazards at work.
To advance their efforts, the WNH&E collected research on avoidable causes of breast cancer, including environmental and occupational pollutants. Seeking an international analysis, the WNH&E also argued that “Man-made toxins – such as organochlorines and nuclear pollutants – are being produced without regard to our lives, the lives of our families, future generations and the planet,” and that “the US, Germany, Japan, and many other countries export toxins to developing countries. In some areas, whole communities are being poisoned and destroyed.” As such, records in the archives illustrate inherent connections between reproductive and environmental justice that seem even more relevant today than they were just a few decades ago.
Conclusion
As this exhibit has demonstrated through the records held in the Women’s Archives Collections at the Archives and Special Collections, the meaning of reproductive justice in Canada is evolving. While the earliest feminists sought to curb reproductive rights for women deemed by society as “unfit mothers,” including Indigenous women, disabled women, lesbians, and women of colour, radical and socialist feminists of the 1960s and '70s sought to guarantee “the right to choose” for all women, regardless of race, class, or ability.
The 1988 Supreme Court decision on R v. Morgentaler decriminalized abortion and made the Federal government responsible for ensuring that Canadians have access to reproductive health services; nevertheless, many demands of the 1960s socialist feminist movement remain unaddressed. Combating the eugenicist ideologies of early developments in contraception required reframing reproductive rights to encompass more than simple decriminalization of contraceptives and abortion.
For example, the May 1970 Abortion Caravan demanded “the construction of women’s community-controlled clinics to provide free birth control, abortion on demand, and pre-natal and post-natal care; to be financed 50% by Federal funds and 50% by provincial funds to come from taxing corporate profits specifically for this purpose.” Yet in 2019, almost 50 years later, the Canadian Pediatric Society identified cost as a significant barrier using contraception for youth in Canada. According to feminist historian Christabelle Sethna, geographic and financial barriers are especially relevant to the accessibility of reproductive resources for Indigenous communities.
Image (Right): Postcard from [Birth Control and VD] Clinic in North York, Ontario, 1985, 10-001-S3-I54.
In 1970, the Abortion Caravan stated emphatically that “When we demand women’s control over our bodies, we mean total control. If we are poor, we demand the same rights as rich women, that is to have children or not, as we see fit. Birth control and abortion is our right but should not be forced on us.” Their statement reflects the Caravan’s nascent understanding of reproductive justice as an intersectional framework for gender equality.
While Sethna notes that “Canada is one of the few countries in the world where termination is not illegal,” it is important to remember that reproductive justice involves not just the termination of pregnancy, but also includes sexual education, financial and geographical access to healthcare, legislation surrounding child custody, the development of new reproductive technologies, protection from workplace hazards and chemicals, the regulation of corporate extraction and waste disposal, the expansion of clean, safe energy, and feminist struggles for peace and disarmament.
Image (Right): Women in [Women's Health] Clinic [Winnipeg, Manitoba], 1992-1993, 10-051-S1-F36-I2.
Due to the evolving nature of reproductive justice, emerging aspects of the term have not been addressed in this exhibit. For example, conversations surrounding reproduction are often focused on cisgender women, to the detriment of developing quality health care for transgendered or gender non-conforming individuals. Likewise, analysis of workplace reproductive hazards has similarly focused on pregnant women, even though male workers are also exposed to workplace hazards that may cause sterility. And mental healthcare, which is fundamental to parents’ ability to raise their children in a healthy environment, is frequently dismissed as separate from reproductive concerns. Considering the productive debates and struggles that took place largely during the last fifty years, how might the meaning of reproductive justice evolve and change as we move through the 21st century?
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References
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Charmillot, M., Jacot-Descombes, C., & Földhazi, À. (2021). Introduction. In Droits humains et éducation sexuelle : Contexte, perceptions et pratiques (p. 15‑22). Éditions ies. http://books.openedition.org/ies/5045
Cox, Sue (Winter 1993). "Strategies for the Present, Strategies for the Future: Feminist Resistance to New Reproductive Technologies". Canadian Woman Studies. 13 (2): 25–28.
Faraday, F. (1992). Can Post-structuralist Theory Help us Discover a Feminist Method for Creating Laws?: A Case Study on the Debate About New Reproductive Technologies. National Association of Women and the Law.
Habib J. and Weir, L. (1996). A Feminist Alternative Policy Framework for Reproductive Technologies.
National Association of Women and the Law (2004). The Assisted Human Reproductive Act: Regulations OF or FOR Women’s Equality.
Rathus, S. A., McKay, A., Nevid, J. S., Fichner-Rathus, L., & Milhausen, R. (2020). Human sexuality in a world of diversity (Sixth Canadian edition.). Pearson.
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