Still touchy after all these years

It is a controversy not likely to go away anytime soon.

Dr. Henry Morgentaler’s recent appointment to the Order of Canada has ruffled more feathers than a cat in a chicken coop — much more than the announcement of any previous inductee to this prestigious group.

And for good reason.

After decades of passionate debate, legal abortion remains one of the most sensitive and divisive of all social issues in North America, and no one in Canada has stood as so prominent a pro-choice icon than Dr. Morgentaler.

He is either a hero or a monster, depending on which side of the moral fence you happen to have pitched your tent on.

Although I don’t know the man personally and, thankfully, never had occasion to call upon his services, Dr. Morgentaler was always more than a face on TV or in the newspapers to me. He was a flesh-and-blood local character whose presence was felt on a regular basis.

As a kid growing up in the east end — the real east end, not just a few blocks past St. Laurent Blvd. — I was aware of the controversy at an early age. My grandparents lived around the corner from the Morgentaler Clinic on Beaugrand Street (before the Honoré prefix, which only came with the métro station). There was usually at least one person shuffling back and forth on the sidewalk, each carrying a placard to protest the atrocities being carried out inside the house, which was only distinguished from the other brick bungalows by the doctor’s engraved shingle next to the front door.

This touch of real-life drama in an otherwise bland residential neighbourhood naturally prompted a flurry of questions that no adult would dare answer honestly, for who wants to get into the ins and outs of abortion with a curious 10-year-old? As a result, I was never quite sure of what was going on in that house and what those people were protesting. Doctors were, by definition, performers of good deeds — but it was obvious that a lot of people were convinced otherwise.

The subject of Dr. Morgentaler’s appointment is likely to remain particularly touchy here in Westmount, which, we can safely say, proudly boasts one of the highest per capita number of Companions, Officers and Members of the Order of Canada. When it was reported that a few previous OC recipients were considering returning their medals — not unlike the disgruntled British dignitaries who returned their MBEs in 1965 as a protest against the Beatles being inducted into their ranks — my immediate hope was that our own OCs will retain their richly deserved memberships in the Order, no matter how they feel about this latest inductee. Why should they allow their own accomplishments to be overshadowed by a controversial decision by the selection committee?

There is no denying Dr. Morgentaler’s place in Canada’s history books, but his detractors might argue that such logic would also justify inviting the Rose brothers to be inducted into the Order for their part in the October Crisis — like the abortion controversy, an ugly but ultimately defining event in our nation’s history.

Stay tuned, folks. This story looks like it has some hang time to it.