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Henry Morgentaler (born March 19, 1923, in Lodz, Poland) is a Canadian medical doctor, abortionist, and long time abortion activist from Montreal.
Morgentaler is a Holocaust survivor. After living through Auschwitz, he accepted an United Nations scholarship that was being offered to Jewish survivors. He went to medical school in Germany while living with a German family who was forced to house him under the program.
Upon graduation he refused to go to Israel because he did not believe in Zionism. He and his wife left Europe in 1950 to travel to Canada where he would practice medicine in Montreal. He would work there as a general practitioner for nearly twenty years before his convictions about aborition caused serious conflict with others. On October 19, 1967, he testified publically before a Government of Canada committee about his belief that any pregnant woman should have the right to a safe abortion.
In 1969 he gave up his family practice and began openly performing illegal abortions. Soon after in 1970 he was arrested in Quebec for performing one. This was three years before the Supreme Court of the United States would legalize aborition in the Roe v. Wade case. Later in 1973 he would claim to have performed 5,000 illegal abortions. He would be acquitted by a jury in the court case, though this was overturned by five Roman Catholic judges on the Quebec Court of Appeal in 1974. He was sent to prison, though he appealed and was aquitted again.
Monrgentaler was charged again in 1983 in Ontario for procuring illegal miscarriages. He was acquitted by a jury, but the verdict was reversed by the Ontario Court of Appeal. The case was then sent to the Supreme Court of Canada. He was acquitted again, and the Canadian Supreme Court] declared the law he was convicted under to be unconstitutional in the case of Morgentaler et. al. v. Her Majesty The Queen 1988 (1 S.C.R. 30). This ruling essentially ended all statutory restrictions on abortion in Canada.
Monrgentaler is currently working to open two aborition clinics in the Canadian Arctic, so that women who live there do not have to travel vast distances from their homes for abortions.
Monrgentaler was also the first president of the Humanist Association of Canada.
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