No choice
Fredericton hospital suspends abortion services
BY Jennifer O’Connor
The state of publicly funded abortions in New Brunswick was dealt a blow this summer when the Dr. Everett Chalmers Hospital in Fredericton suspended services. The hospital, which provided about 400 of the 404 medicare-covered abortions performed in the province last year, said doctors were too busy, a reason some find dubious.
“I think it’s a pretty blatant excuse,” says Michelle Leblanc, a member of the Access to Options Caucus of the Fredericton Social Network. She believes there probably weren’t enough doctors available on a volunteer basis, but says: “You don’t cut an entire service at a hospital due to any kind of shortage.”
While two other hospitals have begun to offer services to fill the void, Steven Benteau, a spokesperson for the provincial Department of Health, will not disclose their locations, citing concern about anti-abortion harassment.
According to Benteau, regional health authorities were told which hospitals are providing services so they could in turn let doctors know.
But Judy Burwell, the former manager of the Morgentaler Clinic in Fredericton and a member of the Abortion Rights Coalition of Canada, counters the information wasn’t effectively dispersed. More than two months after this relay was supposed to have taken place, she says, the Morgentaler Clinic was still fielding calls from women whose doctors didn’t know where to refer them for a medicare-covered abortion.
Under New Brunswick’s Medical Services Payment Act, women seeking a publicly funded abortion need two doctors to deem it “medically necessary.” But a lot of women don’t have a physician, and, as Burwell says, “There are many anti-choice doctors in this province, so they’re not going to help their patient anyway.” The procedure must also be performed in a hospital by an obstetrician/gynecologist within the first trimester. The roughly 600 women who went to the Morgentaler Clinic last year had to pay up to $750 themselves, according to Burwell, as New Brunswick is the only province that refuses to pay for abortions performed in private clinics. Dr. Henry Morgentaler’s 2004 lawsuit against the provincial government over medicare coverage is still in court.
Meanwhile, major barriers exist for women wanting abortions in the rest of Canada as well. For instance, the Globe and Mail reports fewer than one in five hospitals provide abortion services—none in Prince Edward Island or Nunavut do, according to Canadians for Choice—and RU-486 (a.k.a. “the abortion pill”), which the World Health Organization named an “essential medicine,” is still not available in this country. The company that manufactures the drug, Roussel Uclaf, won’t market it in any country unless asked to do so, and that’s the federal government’s choice to make.
