When Did the Abortion Pill Become Legal in Canada

In 1982, there were 66,319 legal abortions in Canada. [33] The interpretation of the 1969 Act varied considerably between physicians and hospitals, resulting in unequal access. The norm was the physical or mental well-being of the woman, which was decided by the therapeutic abortion committee of a hospital. However, it was not necessary for a hospital to have a TAC to assess women. Only about a third of hospitals had one. Some committees took a liberal position and allowed most questions, while others blocked almost all questions. Access to legal abortion was easy in large metropolitan areas, but much more difficult outside major cities. In the province of Prince Edward Island, the isolated therapeutic abortion committee was closed and, after 1982, there were no legal abortions in the province. [34] Therapeutic abortion committees often took days or weeks to make their decisions and pushed a pregnancy further than would otherwise have been the case. The women were not seen by the committee and did not have the right to appeal a decision. Proponents of abortion rights believed that the choice should be made by the woman, not a group of doctors. [35] Canada is also committed to implementing the right to health without discrimination, including discrimination against women.

A significant burden of female disease is related to reproduction, and reproductive health care is therefore considered a primary obligation under the right to health.10 To achieve the highest attainable standard of health, women must have the freedom to choose if and when they want to reproduce, and the right to health care, which is necessary to make their decisions. In 2011, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration responded to concerns about previous deaths possibly related to RU-486, saying the infection posed a risk associated with any abortion procedure. Since the 1988 decision, abortion has continued to be a burning political issue. Public opinion polls consistently show that Canadians are divided on this issue. In 2010, an EKOS/Globe and Mail poll found that a slim majority of Canadians, 52 per cent, were in favour of voting; 27 percent were for life. The remaining 21% would not join either camp. Canadian health authorities have approved the drug RU-486, commonly known as the abortion pill. Abortion was first legalized by the Supreme Court of Canada in 1988. Raifman S, Orlando M, Rafie S, Grossman D. Medical abortion: potential for improving patient access by pharmacies.

2018;58(4):377–81. doi.org/10.1016/j.japh.2018.04.011. The Government of Prince Edward Island announces that a Women`s Wellness Centre will be established at Prince County Hospital in Summerside, which will include surgical and medical abortions. It will be commissioned in early 2017. An important criterion under Canadian extradition law is „double jeopardy“ if the conduct for which a person is wanted is also illegal in Canada. Because neither abortion nor the prescription of the abortion pill is illegal in Canada, such requests are unlikely to meet the test, said Robert Currie, a law professor at Dalhousie University in Nova Scotia. In Canada, all surgical abortions are performed by a physician, with nurses, pharmacists and midwives able to provide medication for non-invasive medical abortions within nine weeks (63 days) of pregnancy. [11] [12] The abortion rate in Canada has been relatively stable since decriminalization; The rate of registered abortions per 1000 women of reproductive age (15-44 years) was 10.2 in 1974, rising to 16.4 abortions per thousand women in 1997 and 10.1 abortions per 1000 women in 2020. [13] [14] [15] However, these abortion rates only reflect the number of abortions reported by abortion clinics and hospitals. They factor in unreported abortions in this context or count abortions induced by prescription drugs such as mifepristone and misoprostol at home, and so these official abortion rates underestimate the actual abortion rate.

[14] Nevertheless, Canada has a low abortion rate overall compared to other countries,[2] with approximately 74,000 abortions in 2020. About half of abortions occur in women between the ages of 18 and 29 and about 90% of abortions are performed in the first trimester (12 weeks). [16] A 2007 study published in the New England Journal of Medicine compared 2,710 women who had a RU-486 abortion with 9,104 women who had a surgical abortion and found no increased risk of ectopic pregnancies, miscarriages, premature births, or low birth weight babies in subsequent pregnancies. The cost of Mifegymiso ranges from $300 to $450 per package, depending on the provider. This means that without coverage, medical abortion with this combination of drugs remains inaccessible to many people in Canada. The movement to liberalize Canada`s abortion laws began in the 1960s. The former chief coroner of Ontario, Morton Shulman, recalls that in the sixties, abortions could only be performed legally to save the woman`s life, so there were virtually no legal abortions. He explained that pregnant daughters of the rich were sent to reliable doctors who performed abortions for money. He estimated that these doctors performed twenty to thirty abortions a week.

Women who were not wealthy had to have abortions or undergo what he called a „nursing“ abortion. Their method often involved pumping Lysol into the woman`s uterus. The mortality rate was high and the infection rate was over 50%. He added: „When I became Chief Coroner, I had the unpleasant experience of seeing the bodies of a few dozen young women who died as a result of these amateur abortions.“ [24] Our findings will also be relevant to researchers involved in research of large-scale implementation related to abortion or similar stigmatized health services. Given that there are no legal restrictions on abortion in Canada and that restrictions on mifepristone were lifted by the Canadian regulator during our study, political barriers had minimal impact on Canadian pharmacists. In the United States, where federal policy is a persistent barrier to dispensing pharmacists, pharmacists support the lifting of restrictions on the dispensing of mifepristone [3, 42, 43]. These attitudes are consistent with Australian research, where pharmacists dispensing mifepristone felt it was part of their routine practice [44]. Previous research has shown that mifepristone distributed outside of hospitals, clinics and doctors` offices is safe and acceptable for patients and prescribers [13, 45, 46]. Our two-framework approach, which combines integrated TC with the innovation diffusion framework, can be a useful model for other health systems.

In Australia, our approach is used and tested by the AusCAPPS (The Australian Contraception and Abortion Primary Care Practitioner Support) network, a community of practice that helps primary care professionals provide evidence-based abortion and contraceptive care and provide decision-makers with real-world real-world experience to facilitate support for practice [47]. Under Canadian law, abortion treatment is not limited to hospitals or clinics. On the contrary, as confirmed by the Society of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists of Canada in its guidelines on induced abortions, first trimester abortions „can be performed safely by experienced staff in clinics or doctors` offices.“ 25(p1016) Doctors` offices cannot be equipped with the special instruments or local anesthetics required for surgical abortion.