OTTAWA— Dr. Henry Morgentaler turns 80 in March. But as the foremost public advocate in Canada of unlimited access to abortion since the 1960s, he shows no signs of abatement.

As an abortionist he describes himself as “part-time”—performing “maybe 30” terminations per week at his Toronto outlet, where he said other doctors now do much of the work.

As the founder and owner of eight private abortion clinics across Canada, Morgentaler at a Dec. 4 press conference called for “complete secularization of all public hospitals…and an end to whatever affiliation they have had with religious bodies, in particular with the Catholic Church.”

“When hospitals are or become Catholic through mergers,” he said, “they deprive patients of access to abortion, contraception and AIDS prevention, thereby imposing a religious doctrine on public tax-supported hospitals.”

Flanked by abortion lobbyists, Morgentaler invoked his alter ego as founding president (and now first vice president) of the Humanist Association of Canada.

“We live in a multicultural, non-sectarian society,” he said.

In a Dec. 11 interview from Toronto, Morgentaler added, “There is no reason why in a pluralistic society…hospitals should be affiliated with a particular religion,” whether Catholic, Protestant or Jewish.

Many hospitals in Canada were started by churches and religious orders. But all are now incorporated by law into the government system. However, facilities owned and operated by church boards, although publicly funded, in large measure retain their autonomy in the provision of services.

Msgr. Paul Schonenbach, English-language general secretary of the Canadian Conference of Catholic Bishops, said Morgentaler is barking up the wrong tree.

“In those few jurisdictions where there is now only a Catholic hospital, it's the fault of government cutbacks [necessitating hospital mergers], not the hospital,” he said.

Msgr. Schonenbach also took issue with Morgentaler's assertion that Canada is a “nonsectarian” society: “We are not a nonsectarian society but a society with many traditions.”

Pluralism, according to Richard Haughian, president of the Catholic Health Association of Canada, “means that you have different value systems that are allowed to coexist within a common framework,” as opposed to Morgentaler's “reductionism to a situation where we are all the same, where diversity is to be eliminated.”

“In our tradition in Canada,” Haughian said, “the place of privately-owned, not-for-profit health care delivery in hospitals and homes has been recognized throughout our history.”

But Morgentaler dismissed this tradition as a “relic of the past.” He said health care has evolved, and it would be a “continuing refinement of our democracy” to exorcize the remaining religious presence in the name of “tolerance.”

‘Pioneer’

There is no comparable personality to Morgentaler in the United States.

“Canada has a fascinating and unique history around abortion,” wrote Joyce Arthur on the Pro-Choice Action Network's Web site, “because a single lone figure—one doctor — stands out as a great Canadian hero, a pioneer who forged the way in the struggle for safe, legal abortion on demand.”

Abortion was legalized in 1969 under Pierre Trudeau's first Liberal administration. But the procedure was limited to hospitals, and after multiple charges dating back several years, Morgentaler served 10 months of an 18-month jail sentence in 1975-76 for procuring abortions in his private practice.

In 1988, the Supreme Court resolved Morgentaler's 20-year legal struggle by striking down the remaining criminal provisions, giving rise to Canada's unrestricted abortion license today.

Since 1988, the abortion rate has climbed from 19 per 100 live births to 33, with a total of 110,331 abortions recorded in 1998, the most recent year for which national figures have been released.

Abortion is now fully tax-funded in hospitals across Canada as well as in five of Morgentaler's eight private clinics. Three provinces, Manitoba in the West and New Brunswick and Nova Scotia on the East Coast, pay the doctor's service fee but refuse to cover extra clinic fees of up to $500.

Morgentaler won't discuss his income. In October, a pro-life group estimated his gross annual revenues at more than $7 million, but he denies the figure. Five clinics generate undisclosed profits that subsidize the other three, he said, and supplement the unknown salaries Morgentaler draws as “medical director” from his publicly supported Toronto and Montreal clinics.

He does not think a baby feels pain until “maybe seven months,” at which time he does not “believe” in abortion. (However, babies born at five months have been known to survive.) He finds “absurd” the notion that life begins at conception.

“I do not believe in God, I do not believe in an afterlife,” Morgentaler said, describing his personal spirituality as “naturalistic.” He extolled the “richness of the human spirit, adventure, stoicism and perseverance,” and said his heroes are “Mandela, Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Erich Fromm and Bertrand Russell.”

Morgentaler said if Catholics want to have a hospital that “imposes” Catholic doctrine, then “co-religionists” should pay for their own private hospital. That is easy to say, given that private health services are illegal in Canada except for a few clinics, including Morgentaler's chain.

David Jensen, spokesman for the Ontario ministry of health, said it is unrealistic to expect “every hospital to offer every procedure and service. Our view is that abortion services are being provided in an accessible manner,” he said, if not at every hospital then in every region.

Msgr. Bernard Rossi, episcopal vicar for health care in the Archdiocese of Vancouver, said there has been no serious coercion of British Columbia's Catholic hospitals, even under the former hard-line socialist provincial government.

But Msgr. Rossi said there has been more or less constant pressure for the hospitals to amalgamate with nonreligious institutions under regional health authorities and thus abandon their Catholic identity.

Pavel Reid, a spokesman for the Vancouver Archdiocese, said secularists should not underestimate the value of that Catholic identity in caring for patients nonreligious hospitals are afraid to touch. When the HIV crisis exploded in the 1980s, he said, the city's largest Catholic facility, St. Paul's, was “the only hospital willing to create an AIDS ward.”

Msgr. Schonenbach foresees no pressure on Catholic hospitals to provide abortions or contraception and stands by the conscience rights of Church-run facilities.

“We don't see abortion as a health-giving situation,” he said. “A hospital is there to give health, not to terminate life.”

Chris Champion writes from Ottawa.