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Therapeutic abortion committees (commonly known as TACs) were committees established under the Canadian Criminal Code. Each committee consisted of three medical doctors who would decide whether a request for an abortion fit within the exception to the criminal offence of procuring a miscarriage, i.e. performing an abortion. The Criminal Code only permitted lawful abortion if continuation of a pregnancy would cause a woman medical harm, as certified by a TAC. The TACs were almost always composed of men, due to fewer women practicing medicine and even fewer having these types of high level positions.[ citation needed ] These restrictions on abortion were struck down as unconstitutional by the Supreme Court of Canada in its decision in R v Morgentaler in 1988.
Prior to 1968, abortion was a criminal offence in Canada. Any woman who sought an abortion was potentially committing a criminal offence. If a doctor performed an abortion on compassionate or medical grounds, the doctor ran the risk of being prosecuted under the Criminal Code.
In many cases, judges were willing to convict but juries were unwilling to condemn any qualified medical doctor acting in good faith with the intention to protect the health of a patient.[ citation needed ]
In 1968, the federal Minister of Justice, Pierre Trudeau, introduced the Criminal Law Amendment Act, 1968-69 to amend the Criminal Code in many respects, including in relation to abortion. [1] The bill introduced the concept of therapeutic abortion committees, which could approve abortions for medical reasons. The committees were based in hospitals and had to be composed of three doctors. The doctor who proposed to perform an abortion could not be a member of the committee which considered the request.
Following the passage of the Criminal Law Amendment Act, 1968–69, the provisions dealing with abortion read as follows:
These were the provisions of the law which the Supreme Court ruled to be unconstitutional in R v Morgentaler.
Abortion clinics were illegal under this law; in Québec only, authorities concluded in the 1970s that the law was unenforceable after a number of unsuccessful criminal cases against doctors. Most notably Henry Morgentaler openly operated clinics as a form of civil disobedience in order to establish a judicial test case based on the legal defence of necessity.
Even within the hospital system, there were great discrepancies between what different TAC's in different hospitals would be willing to consider a risk to a woman's health.
In some hospitals, mental health problems resulting from carrying a pregnancy to term were acceptable to the TAC as endangering a woman's health. This made abortion partially accessible (albeit with at best limited access and some rather unacceptable delays) in some communities as women could claim to be suicidal and on this basis insist that continuation of the unwanted pregnancy represented an imminent danger to mental health.[ citation needed ]
In other TAC's the law was interpreted much more closely, making it difficult to get an abortion in the hospital even if they did have a TAC.[ citation needed ]
In some cases, procedures required to protect a woman's life were not available during pregnancy. A prime example would be cancer treatments such as chemotherapy which would do extensive and irreversible harm to an embryo or foetus if done during pregnancy but which, if not done in a timely fashion, can allow the cancer to spread to a point at which the condition is fatal and no longer successfully medically treatable.[ citation needed ]
These were the cases which the TAC's were originally intended to address, but many hospitals were unwilling to perform abortions at all.[ citation needed ]
Hospitals had therapeutic abortion committees only if they opted to provide abortions, and there was and is no requirement that they do so.[ citation needed ] As well, the requirement for three doctors to sit on a committee, in addition to the doctor who proposed to perform an abortion, meant that abortions were only available in hospitals where there were four doctors familiar with the procedure.
The end result was a very limited access to lawful abortion which varied widely from one town or province to another. Many towns and cities did not have any hospital that provided abortions.[ citation needed ]
In 1988, a case involving Morgentaler reached the Supreme Court of Canada. The court ruled that the provisions relating to abortion were contrary to section 7 of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. Although there was no single majority judgment, the three judgments finding the provisions unconstitutional concluded that the delays and limited access to abortion inherent in the system of therapeutic abortion committees violated the right to security of the person of a woman seeking an abortion. The delays and limited access potentially had a profound impact on a woman's health and thus infringed her rights to liberty and security of the person, contrary to section 7 of the Charter.
The court held that this section of the Criminal Code was unconstitutional and inoperative. The effect of the decision was that abortion was decriminalized in Canada. [3] [4]
Following the Supreme Court decision, the Progressive Conservative government of Prime Minister Brian Mulroney explored legislative options in response to the decision. In 1990, a compromise bill, Bill C-34 passed the Commons. Similar to the previous requirement for approval by a TAC, it would have required the consent of one additional doctor, other than the one who proposed to perform the abortion. Although Bill C-34 passed the Commons, it was defeated in a tie vote in the Senate of Canada, marking the end of criminalisation of abortion in Canada. [5]
Abortion in the United Kingdom is de facto available under the terms of the Abortion Act 1967 in Great Britain and the Abortion (No.2) Regulations 2020 in Northern Ireland. The procurement of an abortion remains a criminal offence in Great Britain under the Offences Against the Person Act 1861, although the Abortion Act provides a legal defence for both the pregnant woman and her doctor in certain cases. Although a number of abortions did take place before the 1967 Act, there have been around 10 million abortions in the United Kingdom. Around 200,000 abortions are carried out in England and Wales each year and just under 14,000 in Scotland; the most common reason cited under the ICD-10 classification system for around 98% of all abortions is "risk to woman's mental health."
Henekh "Henry" Morgentaler, was a Polish-born Canadian physician and abortion rights advocate who fought numerous legal battles aimed at expanding abortion rights in Canada. As a Jewish youth during World War II, Morgentaler was imprisoned at the Łódź Ghetto and later at the Dachau concentration camp.
Abortion in Canada is legal throughout pregnancy and is publicly funded as a medical procedure under the combined effects of the federal Canada Health Act and provincial health-care systems. However, access to services and resources varies by region. While some restrictions exist, Canada is one of the few nations with no criminal restrictions on abortion. Abortion is subject to provincial healthcare regulatory rules and guidelines for physicians. No provinces offer abortion on request at 24 weeks and beyond, although there are exceptions for certain medical complications.
Abortion laws vary widely among countries and territories, and have changed over time. Such laws range from abortion being freely available on request, to regulation or restrictions of various kinds, to outright prohibition in all circumstances. Many countries and territories that allow abortion have gestational limits for the procedure depending on the reason; with the majority being up to 12 weeks for abortion on request, up to 24 weeks for rape, incest, or socioeconomic reasons, and more for fetal impairment or risk to the woman's health or life. As of 2022, countries that legally allow abortion on request or for socioeconomic reasons comprise about 60% of the world's population.
R v Morgentaler, [1988] 1 SCR 30 was a decision of the Supreme Court of Canada which held that the abortion provision in the Criminal Code was unconstitutional because it violated women's rights under section 7 of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms ("Charter") to security of the person. Since this ruling, there have been no criminal laws regulating abortion in Canada.
The Offences against the Person Act 1861 is an Act of the Parliament of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland. It consolidated provisions related to offences against the person from a number of earlier statutes into a single Act. For the most part these provisions were, according to the draftsman of the Act, incorporated with little or no variation in their phraseology. It is one of a group of Acts sometimes referred to as the Criminal Law Consolidation Acts 1861. It was passed with the object of simplifying the law. It is essentially a revised version of an earlier consolidation act, the Offences Against the Person Act 1828, incorporating subsequent statutes.
The practice of induced abortion—the deliberate termination of a pregnancy—has been known since ancient times. Various methods have been used to perform or attempt abortion, including the administration of abortifacient herbs, the use of sharpened implements, the application of abdominal pressure, and other techniques. The term abortion, or more precisely spontaneous abortion, is sometimes used to refer to a naturally occurring condition that ends a pregnancy, that is, to what is popularly called a miscarriage. But in what follows the term abortion will always refer to an induced abortion.
R v Davidson, also known as the Menhennitt ruling, was a significant ruling delivered in the Supreme Court of Victoria on 26 May 1969. It concerned the legality of abortion in the Australian state of Victoria. The ruling was not the end of the case, but rather answered certain questions of law about the admissibility of evidence, so as to allow the trial to proceed.
Abortion is illegal in El Salvador. The law formerly permitted an abortion to be performed under some limited circumstances, but in 1998 all exceptions were removed when a new abortion law went into effect.
This is a timeline of reproductive rights legislation, a chronological list of laws and legal decisions affecting human reproductive rights. Reproductive rights are a sub-set of human rights pertaining to issues of reproduction and reproductive health. These rights may include some or all of the following: the right to legal or safe abortion, the right to birth control, the right to access quality reproductive healthcare, and the right to education and access in order to make reproductive choices free from coercion, discrimination, and violence. Reproductive rights may also include the right to receive education about contraception and sexually transmitted infections, and freedom from coerced sterilization, abortion, and contraception, and protection from practices such as female genital mutilation (FGM).
Abortion in Malta is illegal except in cases where the life of the pregnant woman is at risk. Until 2023, it was illegal without exception. Malta has the most restrictive laws in Europe, alongside Andorra, regarding abortion. Such laws have been said to be influenced by Roman Catholicism, which 82% of Malta's population identified as according to the 2021 census.
Abortion in Colombia is freely available on request up to the 24th week of pregnancy, due to a ruling by the Constitutional Court on February 21, 2022. Later in pregnancy, it is only allowed in cases of risk of death to the pregnant woman, fetal malformation, or rape, according to a Constitutional Court ruling in 2006.
Foeticide, or feticide, is the act of killing a fetus, or causing a miscarriage. Definitions differ between legal and medical applications, whereas in law, feticide frequently refers to a criminal offense, in medicine the term generally refers to a part of an abortion procedure in which a provider intentionally induces fetal demise to avoid the chance of an unintended live birth, or as a standalone procedure in the case of selective reduction.
Canadian Association for Repeal of the Abortion Law (CARAL) was a coalition of abortion rights activists, created in 1974, to protest the incarceration of Dr. Henry Morgentaler, who was jailed for providing safe, yet not legalized, abortions in Canada. The organization later changed its name to the Canadian Abortion Rights Action League (CARAL/ACDA).
Abortion in Thailand is legal and available on-request up to 20 weeks of pregnancy. Abortion has been legal up to at least 12 weeks of pregnancy since 7 February 2021. Following a 2020 ruling of the Constitutional Court which declared a portion of the abortion statutes unconstitutional, the Parliament removed first-term abortion from the criminal code. Once strict, over time laws have been relaxed to take into account high rates of teen pregnancy, women who lack the means or will to raise children, and the consequences of illegal abortion.
Abortion in South Korea was decriminalized, effective 1 January 2021, by a 2019 order of the Constitutional Court of Korea.
Abortion in Queensland, Australia, is available on request in the first 22 weeks of pregnancy, with the approval of two doctors usually required for later terminations of pregnancy. Queensland law prohibits protesters from coming within 150 metres of an abortion clinic and requires conscientiously objecting doctors to refer women seeking an abortion to a doctor who will provide one. The current legal framework was introduced by the Palaszczuk Labor Government with the passage of the Termination of Pregnancy Act by the Parliament of Queensland on 17 October 2018 in a conscience vote. Before the Termination of Pregnancy Act took effect on 3 December 2018, abortion was subject to the Criminal Code and the common law McGuire ruling, which made abortion unlawful unless the abortion provider had a reasonable belief that a woman's physical or mental health was at risk. Availability varies across the state, and is more limited in rural and remote areas outside South East Queensland. In the absence of standardised data collection, it is estimated that between 10,000 and 14,000 abortions occur every year in Queensland.
Abortion in Ghana is banned except when there is a vaild exemption. The abortion should also be conducted only at a Government hospital; registered private hospital, clinics registered under the Private Hospitals and Maternity Homes Act, 1958 and a place approved by the Minister of Health by a Legislative Instrument. Illegal abortions are criminal offenses subject to at most five years in prison for the pregnant woman who induced said abortion, as well as for any doctor or other person who assisted this pregnant woman in accessing, or carrying out, an abortion. Attempts to cause abortions are also criminal, as are the purveyance, supply, or procurement of chemicals and instruments whose intent is to induce abortions.
Abortion in Arizona is legal for up to 15 weeks gestation.
Rex v Bourne, The King v Aleck Bourne, or the Bourne Judgment, was a British landmark court case in 1938 relating to an abortion performed by obstetric surgeon Aleck Bourne on a 14-year-old girl who had become pregnant as a result of being raped. The judge directed the jury towards the concept that situations arise where abortion might protect the health of the mother. Bourne was found not guilty of performing the procedure unlawfully and the judgment set the precedence for several subsequent abortion cases and the Abortion Act 1967 (UK).