Morgentaler, Henry, 1923-2013 : Henry Morgentaler was born in Lodz, Poland in 1923 where he received his early education. After the German invasion of Poland in 1939 his father, a well-known socialist, was arrested and murdered by the Nazi occupiers in March 1940. Later that year he and his family were forced into the Lodz Ghetto. His sister, having run to Warsaw, was eventually sent to the Treblinka death camp. In August 1944 they were transported to Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp where his mother perished. He and his brother were then moved to Dachau concentration camp from which they were liberated by American forces in April 1945. Upon liberation in 1945 he studied medicine first in Germany and then at the University of Brussels. He emigrated to Canada in 1950 and graduated in medicine at the Université de Montréal in 1953. After his research and residency he opened a general practice in east end Montreal in 1955.
A life-long secular Humanist, Dr. Morgentaler was President of the Montreal Humanist Fellowship from 1964 to 1968 and the founding president of the Humanist Association of Canada (HAC) from 1968 to 1972. He was also Director of the Civil Liberties Union, Montreal from 1964 to 1968. In 1964, he founded the Committee for Neutral Schools, a social action group, for the replacement of Quebec's confessional public school system with a secular one. In 1967 he presented the Humanist Association of Canada's pro-choice Brief on reform of Canada's abortion law to the House of Commons Committee on Health and Welfare. In 1968, the year he founded the HAC, he established his first abortion clinic in Montreal. In 1973 he embarked on a campaign of civil disobedience against Canada's abortion laws, while pioneering the vacuum-suction method for abortion, having perfected the procedure for use in free-standing clinics. He published a report about the medical abortions he performed in his Montreal clinic in the December 1973 issue of the Journal of the Canadian Medical Association while publically proclaiming that he had performed abortions at public rallies across Canada.
Dr. Morgentaler stood trial on four charges of performing an illegal abortion in 1973, 1975, 1976 in Montreal and 1984 in Toronto. On each occasion he was acquitted by a jury. After his first jury acquittal the Supreme Court of Canada upheld Quebec Court of Appeal decision to substitute a guilty verdict for the jury acquittal. He served ten months in Quebec prisons including Bordeaux jail 1975-1976. While imprisoned, he received the American Humanist Award for his efforts to legalize abortion in Canada. In October 1975, the House of Commons passed the "Morgentaler Amendment" which removes the right of an appeal court to substitute a guilty verdict for a jury acquittal.
In 1988, the Supreme Court of Canada, calling it the "Morgentaler Decision", struck down Canada's abortion law as unconstitutional because it violated Canada's Charter of Rights and Freedoms. Dr. Morgentaler opened free-standing abortion clinics in Winnipeg and Toronto in 1983, Halifax in 1989 and Ottawa in 1994. He eventually won his protracted legal battles against the governments of Manitoba, Ontario and Nova Scotia. On December 22, 1993 Dr. Morgentaler's clinic in Toronto was approved by the Ontario government as a teaching facility in conjunction with the Regional Women's Health Centre. He also established clinics in Newfoundland, New Brunswick, Alberta.
Dr. Morgentaler is the author of Abortion and Contraception 1982 and is the subject of several biographies including Morgentaler: A Difficult Hero by Catherine Dunphy 1997.
He died on May 29, 2013.
