The Badgley report on the abortion law
Thomas, W.D.
Canadian Medical Association Journal 116(9): 966
1977
ISSN/ISBN: 0008-4409 PMID: 858113 Document Number: 124016
The General Council of the Canadian Medical Association approved an extension of the basis for the legal termination of pregnancy. Abortion is now allowed if pregnancy continuation would endanger the life or health of the woman, if there is substantial risk that the child may be born with a grave mental or physical disability, or if there are reasonable grounds to believe that the pregnancy resulted from a rape. The Council additionally recommended that such abortions be performed in active public-treatment hospitals accredited by the Canadian Council on Hospital Accreditation. Acting largely on these recommendations, the Canadian government in 1969 altered the Criminal Code to make provision for an abortion to be lawfully performed by a qualified medical practitioner in an accredited hospital if the therapeutic abortion committee of the hospital determined that pregnancy continuation would endanger the woman's life or health. Within months physicians throughout Canada were beset by requests for therapeutic abortions in numbers they had never faced before. By 1971 the era of liberal abortion had arrived, and more than 30,000 legal abortions were performed in Canada that year. Thereafter, it became more and more apparent to all involved with therapeutic abortion that gross inequities existed in the availability of therapeutic abortion to the women of Canada. As a consequence, the federal government appointed a 3-member committee headed by Professor Robin Badgley. The committee's task was to determine whether the procedure provided in the Criminal Code for obtaining therapeutic abortions was operating equitably across canada. The committee concluded that the procedures set out for the operation of the abortion law are not working equitably. A major cause of the inequity in the working of the law is the requirement that applications for therapeutic abortion be approved by a hospital abortion committee. Additionally, some Canadian women face a financial deterrent to obtaining an abortion.