The history of abortion access on Prince Edward Island

The U.S. Supreme Court last week voted 6-3 to overturn the Roe v. Wade interpretation of the constitution, finding it does not protect abortion rights and opening the way for states to restrict or outright ban the medical procedure.

Prince Edward Island was long considered Canada's most pro-life province, and the Island's abortion politics have a long and fraught history.

Here's a look back at the evolution of abortion rights on P.E.I.

Abortion in Canada was formally banned in 1869 and remained illegal until 1969, when the Criminal Law Amendment Act decriminalized therapeutic abortions, as long as a committee of doctors certified that the pregnancy endangered the pregnant person's life or health.

On P.E.I., the last legal abortion was performed in 1982 when the Protestant and Catholic hospitals merged, shortly before the opening of the Queen Elizabeth Hospital in Charlottetown.

In 1988, the Supreme Court of Canada's historic Morgentaler decision struck down Canada's abortion laws as unconstitutional, ruling that laws against abortion violated Section 7 of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms because they infringed against the right to "life, liberty and security of a person."

The decriminalization of abortion granted access to the procedures across the country, allowing abortions to be treated like any other medical procedure, governed by provincial and medical regulations.

Following the decision, almost all of the provinces began funding abortion under their health legislation. P.E.I. and New Brunswick were the only provinces to restrict payment for abortions, refusing to pay for procedures performed in private clinics.

The P.E.I. government of the time responded to the Morgentaler decision by introducing an anti-abortion resolution – a policy that prohibited abortions from being induced on the Island.

This meant pregnant people had to travel to Nova Scotia or New Brunswick to obtain an abortion. Approval for a publicly-funded procedure required a referral from two doctors, and doctors could refuse to write a referral based on ethical and religious grounds. Abortion access was therefore effectively out of reach for many Islanders.

Abortions performed in a hospital were paid for by the province, but many instead opted to pay the $800 out of pocket for abortions at private clinics, like the Morgentaler Clinic in Fredericton.

A 2014 paper – Trials and Trails of Accessing Abortion on P.E.I., by Colleen MacQuarrie, Jo-Ann MacDonald and Cathrine Chambers – lays out the stories of dozens of people who were essentially barred from accessing abortions as a result of the regulations.

"The access to abortion was described as a maze of multiple paths leading to dead ends, barriers, and delayed access, but participants in the project somehow found a way to end the pregnancy," the paper reads.

"Some were forced to leave the province, others tried to self induce by their own hand or with the help of boyfriends and others used medical abortion; however without local surgical termination, this choice in at least one case resulted in maltreatment in the local emergency room. Some women were forced to continue the pregnancy, give birth, and parent against their will. All participants documented various harms to health in the maze of trying to access abortion services in P.E.I."