Abortion is a personal and private matter, unless you’re on a crusade to change the law, in which case writing the prime minister to highlight just who you’ve conducted abortions on is entirely appropriate. So desperate was Dr. Henry Morgentaler to legalize the practice that he wrote a personal letter to Dear Pierre detailing how he had done abortions on members of Trudeau’s family and other politicians…
The letter, reported on in Maclean’s and by Terry O’Neill, was written in August 1973.
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Brigitte is flabbergasted: How come everybody is so shy about using the term blackmail to describe, well, blackmail? He writes:
Do you know that in my clinic, I have helped wives, daughters, mistresses and relatives of members of the Federal and Provincial Cabinet, including some relatives of yours?
And then he says:
I also want to assure you that if I refer to prominent people having had safe abortions in my clinic it is not with the intention of embarrassing anyone but only to bring into stronger focus the hypocrisy and absurdity of the law.
I’m not buying it. Had I been in Trudeau’s shoes I certainly would have felt threatened by that letter. Which, as Terry O’Neil notes in his piece, “is perhaps a testament to the strength of Trudeau’s character that he refused to budge from his position, even though Morgentaler’s letter could be viewed as a none-too-thinly-veiled threat that, failing to amend the law, names would be named and alleged hypocrites exposed.” Indeed. You can say a lot of unflattering things about Trudeau (I have done so myself, more than once), but he was no pushover.
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