The Women are Coming: The Abortion Caravan half a century later …

Organizer Judy Darcy looks back on a movement and how it still gives her hope

It is March 1970, and I am 20 years old.

I am living in a “movement house” at 52 Elgin Ave. in Toronto with two other women from the Toronto Women’s Liberation Movement. It hums with activity and the phone never stops ringing: callers asking about upcoming meetings or protests; American draft dodgers or deserters seeking refuge in Canada; and women desperate to find information about birth control or abortion.

When I was in high school in the 1960s, birth control and abortion just weren’t talked about. If a girl got pregnant, she was either sent away to a “home for unwed mothers” before she began to show, or, if her parents had money and connections, she might have an abortion, though the word was never spoken. When I had sex for the first time at 17 — a humiliating and coercive experience in the back of a car, in a cornfield — I was terrified that I might be pregnant.

Thankfully, my period did arrive, a little late. But other girls and women weren’t so lucky, and I began to realize why. Until 1969, when Pierre Trudeau’s Liberal government amended the Criminal Code, it was unlawful to disseminate information about birth control in Canada. Homosexuality was against the law. And abortion was illegal. Full stop. Even after Trudeau changed the law, abortion was still not decriminalized. Hospital committees made up of mainly male doctors decided if continuing a pregnancy would threaten a woman’s life or health.

In a meeting in the Sidney Smith building on St. George Street, a Toronto Women’s Liberation Movement member lays out the horrifying statistics. I’ll soon know these numbers off by heart. Nineteen out of 20 women who request medical abortions are refused by their doctors before they even get to the hospital board. Ninety-five per cent of abortions in Canada are still illegal. An estimated 2,000 women die each year from botched abortions; 20,000 to 40,000 women are hospitalized with complications. In Toronto alone, 25,000 illegal abortions are performed each year.

But it gets worse: Indigenous women who are about to give birth, or have just had a child, are being offered two totally unacceptable “choices.” They can agree to be sterilized, or, if they refuse, their children are often taken away from them and placed in state care.

Women across the country are angry. We decide it’s time to build a campaign to push for the decriminalization of abortion. The Vancouver Women’s Caucus proposes a cross-Canada abortion caravan, and other groups come on board. I’m asked to be the full-time TWLM organizer, working with

dozens of volunteers.

I type documents on a manual Underwood typewriter. We leaflet subway and streetcar stops, plaster posters on hydro poles and hoardings, keeping a sharp eye out for the police. We communicate with other women’s groups mainly by “snail mail.” Our network is built without benefit of faxes, cellphones or the internet — much less Facebook, WhatsApp or Twitter.

Despite political differences, several organizations work together. The TWLM on the left and the moderate “New Feminists” are highly suspicious of each other. The anti-poverty group, the “Just Society,” challenges all of us get out of our ivory towers and learn what’s happening in the lives of poor women. It is an uneasy alliance.

I try to dig up hard numbers about hospital admissions following back-street abortions. An official from Toronto General tells me that three to four women a night come into their emergency department after botched abortions. A Toronto East General Hospital staffer tells me that 300 to 550 women are admitted there each year.

We ask women to share their stories with us. One victim of domestic violence was turned down by the Therapeutic Abortion Committee and had to borrow money and travel alone by bus to Buffalo, N.Y. There, she found her way through unfamiliar streets, to a doctor who performed the operation — without anesthesia, with much pain and bleeding, and no recovery period afterward. Many other women have been forced to turn to back-street abortionists who work in unsanitary conditions and don’t know what they are doing. Others become so desperate they insert coat hangers into their uteruses or use Lysol and Drano. They break down as they describe the hemorrhaging, infections and infertility that result.

A married woman with children tells us how humiliating it was to have to qualify by having to prove to the hospital committee that she was “mentally ill,” “unstable” and “incapable of being a good mother.”

We hear from a young woman who feared her family doctor would tell her parents if she asked for birth control. When she finally summoned her courage to see him, he grilled her about her sex life, questioned her about whether she planned to get married and lectured her on the immorality of premarital sex — all while she was lying on the examining table, wearing only a paper gown, her legs spread wide apart in the stirrups.

A woman living in poverty in social housing in Regent Park was pressured into having an unwanted hysterectomy in exchange for being “granted” an abortion.

I don’t remember the names of these women. But I will never forget the fear and anguish on their faces, the threads of shame and stigma and powerlessness woven through all their stories.

On April 27, 1970, 18 women in five vehicles — led by a Volkswagen van, a peace sign on its side, a coffin filled with coat hangers on the roof — leave from the Vancouver Art Gallery.

The caravan stops first in Kamloops, B.C., then makes its way through the Rockies stopping in Calgary, Edmonton, Saskatoon, Regina and Winnipeg. They are met by enthusiastic crowds of women, growing media interest — and more cars join — but they’re also met by bigots and moralists, ferocious opponents.

In “The Abortion Caravan,” Karin Wells writes about the meeting in Thunder Bay’s Knox United Church: “Among the early arrivals (were) eight or 10 very properly dressed stern-faced women most of them in their forties and fifties … flanked by two lay brothers in habits. They marched up the aisle and took over the front row … From the moment the evening began … they shouted ‘slut.’ ‘You should be hung.’ ‘You’re going to hell.’ ‘You’re a murderer.’ … It was vicious.”

It was also a rude awakening: the nascent “pro-life” movement would not give up without a fight.

After stopping in Sault Ste. Marie and Sudbury, the caravan arrives in Toronto. Hundreds of people turn up for our televised meeting at St. Lawrence Hall. A Star reporter described the four of us who took the stage this way:

“The speakers, who objected to wearing makeup for television even though a producer suggested their faces would look washed out on the screen, wouldn’t say whether they were married. None of the four has children … They and their supporters wore pants and boots and ponchos in what almost seemed to be a uniform.”

On Friday, May 8, cars and buses line up behind the VW van on King’s College Circle at the University of Toronto and head out honking and cheering. Others are on their way from the Maritimes, Quebec and other Ontario cities.

When we arrive in Ottawa, we suddenly see hand-mimeographed white posters with plump indigoblue letters plastered everywhere.

“The women are coming! The women are coming!”

We gather in front of the Supreme Court and march through the streets — 600 women from across Canada — the first national women’s march in Canadian history.

Later that day, hundreds of us pack into the Railway Committee Room to make our presentation, but only four MPs have bothered to show up. Three New Democrats — including leader David Lewis and Grace MacInnis, the only woman in the House — and one Conservative. The Liberals’ seats remain empty. We make our speeches and demands. Access to free and safe birth control. Remove abortion from the Criminal Code. Women’s community-controlled health clinics. We leave even more outraged than before.

That night we return to our encampment at a vacant school. An intense debate over strategy continues until the next day. Some say we need more discipline, others that we shouldn’t have leaders. Some say we need to escalate tactics, others that we’ve made our point.

At last, we decide on a strategy that will get the government’s attention.

It is Monday May 11, 1970. While many of our sisters solemnly circle the Centennial Flame on

Parliament Hill, 36 of us slip through the visitors’ entrance unobserved. The guards check our purses, but they don’t see the chains concealed beneath our long sleeves and ladylike white gloves.

The Speaker calls the House to order. Suddenly, a sole woman stands up in one of the public galleries and begins to speak.

“Every year, thousands of women die or are maimed from illegal or back-street abortions.”

Her words reverberate. The guards try to muzzle her; they are astonished to discover that she is chained to her seat. They run out to search for wire-cutters. In the meantime, another woman rises and continues the speech we have all prepared.

She is silenced. Then another woman rises. “These are poor women, working-class women, Native women.” And another. “Women have the right to control our own bodies.” And another … while below, pandemonium.

MPs point at us and swear. Others shout, “Silence in the House!” Eventually, the Speaker bangs his gavel and adjourns the session.

But not before every one of us has spoken.

The guards remove our chains and haul us out. We have shut down the House of Commons for the first time in history. Some of us are questioned, but before long, we are released and join our sisters outside.

It will be 18 more years before abortion is decriminalized.

The Supreme Court of Canada strikes down the law in 1988.

My feminist sisters and I never stop pressuring to get to this victory — but our strategies and tactics change. We build broader alliances, with churches, social agencies and unions. We lobby, use the courts, mobilize public opinion. We change our message: instead of free abortion on demand, we speak of women’s right to choose.

Some women work with Dr. Henry Morgentaler in Toronto who — despite being charged and jailed, despite fanatics firebombing his office and threatening his life — continues to defy the law. B.C. doctor Gary Romalis survives a stabbing and a shooting; the staff and volunteers at the women’s clinic have to check the washrooms every day for bombs, and form human shields to escort patients.

For many of us, the fight broadens to include issues like child care, equal pay, racism, LGBTQ rights and harassment and violence. Some of us confront profound personal challenges, as I do when I discover, to my sorrow, that the Dalkon Shield I was prescribed for birth control — an intra-uterine device sold without proper testing — scarred me internally and that I would never be able to get pregnant. The personal is indeed, deeply political.

The threat of Roe v. Wade being overturned by the U.S. Supreme Court is a brutal reminder that our hard-fought victories in Canada remain fragile.

It should also awaken us to the reality that many poor, Indigenous, racialized and rural women still don’t have access to the health services they need. The cost of travel to a city where medical abortions are performed, paying out of pocket for birth control — not to mention stigma and racism — are still enormous barriers. And low wages, sexual violence, lack of child care and affordable housing limit women’s choices even further.

Our work is far from over, but it is inspiring to hear a diverse array of women speaking out, calling on governments to safeguard and expand the right to comprehensive health care.

As a feminist and a fighter for more than 50 years, it fills my heart with hope.