ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

The Fetus as Blueprint? Secularism, Science, and Abortion Law Reform in Canada, 1967-1969

• In Event: Representing Pregnancy: Science and Culture in the 20th Century 1

English Abstract

In the late 1960s a parliamentary committee struck to consider abortion law reform in Canada struggled to reconcile the competing views of witnesses on the sanctity of fetal life and the pregnant woman’s desire to terminate an unwanted pregnancy. This paper centres on the testimony of one witness, Dr. Henry Morgentaler, representing the Montreal Humanist Federation, contrasting it with the testimony of another, Dr. L. L. de Veber, member of the Society for the Protection of the Unborn, an interfaith organization of physicians. In arguing for liberalizing abortion laws to permit abortion on demand in the first trimester of pregnancy, Morgentaler strained the relationship between secularism, science, and religion as well as modernity and medicine. An avowed pluralist and secularist, Morgentaler rejected Christian, namely Catholic, hardline views of pregnancy, which held that the fetus was sacrosanct from the point of conception onward. In his view, it was not religion but modern science that mattered, so much so that laws and institutions had to adjust to new scientific concepts and discoveries. He informed the committee that scientifically speaking, the fetus was nothing more than a blueprint for human life up until the point of fetal viability. In opposition, de Veber contended that new scientific concepts and discoveries had actually revealed the opposite; the fetus was a human being worthy of life throughout a pregnancy, as evidenced by newly developed medical therapies to treat the fetus in utero. Although many such therapies were still experimental and did not guarantee the birth of a healthy infant, they raised uncomfortable questions about gestational limits, viability and fetal personhood.

Author

• Christabelle Sethna, University of Ottawa