Whatever one's position on "women's reproductive rights", no-one can deny Henry Morgentaler's monumental impact on Canadian law and medicine. His efforts to ensure that women have access to safe and legal abortions have been going on almost a quarter-century and according to the Toronto Star feature writer Catherine Dunphy, his latest biographer, he's still carrying his crusade forward: to new frontiers in eastern Europe.
Almost single-handedly Morgentaler has a racked up an impressive list of achievements in law reform. Thanks to him, a provincial appeal court can no longer set aside a jury's acquittal and substitute its own guilty finding-something that used to happen all the time. Thanks to Morgentaler, the law of injunction has been extended so that a "bubble zone" can be created around a business to stop the harassment of individuals seeking to buy services there.
Thanks to Morgentaler, provincial bureaucrats can't make regulations where they effectively ride their own moral hobby-horses-the courts have ruled that such regulations must follow the strict purposes of the statute they're fleshing out.
While all this may seem like a dry litany of legal points, there's a significant civil liberties impact flowing from each of these things, and each encompasses an issue that goes far beyond the narrower right to an abortion.
In a way it's a pity Dunphy doesn't explore those issues (at least not in any depth). And it's also a pity we don't see more medical data and studies on abortion so we can look at Morgentaler in a more serious context. He is a serious historical figure and deserves a serious historical treatment, but that task must wait for another biographer.
Still, Dunphy's book is worthy of a read and she certainly doesn't miss one legal benefit Canadian women enjoy thanks to Morgentaler. As a result of his appeal to the Supreme Court of Canada, old section 251 of the Criminal Code ("procuring a miscarriage") was struck down in January 1988. Efforts by the Tory government to recriminalize abortion were defeated by one vote in the Senate, and since that time no government has wanted to touch the subject.
One big utility of Dunphy's biography is simply that it "tells the tale" of Morgentaler's major legal battles in clear and orderly prose, and in chronological order. The story is a tortuous and twisted one, and difficult to follow even for those familiar with the issues. But along the way we also get an intimate portrait of Morgentaler, who seems to be one of the most irritating individuals on the planet, going full-square against the Canadian stereotype of the quiet, self-effacing hero.
Starting with his birth in the grim Polish industrial city of Lodz in March 1923, Dunphy takes us through his youthful detention at the Auschwitz and Dachau concentration camps. His mother, father, and sister didn't survive these places, but his brother Mike did. We follow him to Canada, to his graduation from medical school, then to his "conversion" to humanism. We're then led through his various battles against the foes of abortion in Montreal, then on to Toronto and other cities.
Not only do we get Morgentaler's life served up here, but we also get a big chunk of the history of the abortion movement in Canada, complete with an alphabet soup of interest groups who provided financial and moral support for his legal battles-ARCAL, ACALA, CARAL, OCAC, CORC-it's sometimes difficult to keep them all straight (a glossary would have been a big help).
It's quite reasonable to examine Morgentaler's life in this context because it's certainly arguable that he provided the focal point for many of these groups' successes.
But paradoxically, Dunphy points out, a great many of the women in these movements resented supporting Morgentaler and his lawyers. There were often ideological differences: Morgentaler-at least when provincial governments refused to provide funding for abortions-always made it clear to patients that he was providing a medical service in a private clinic and that he expected to be paid for his work, with fees sometimes as high as $400 per procedure.
Although he would often waive or reduce his fee for hardship cases, his capitalistic outlook offended many in the pro-choice movement. Some saw abortion services as something to be furnished in non-profit health collectives, run by women, for women.
Morgentaler also drew criticism from his supporters for his choice of lawyers. In Manitoba, his counsel was Greg Brodsky, Winnipeg's most expensive criminal lawyer and a defender of rapists and wife-killers. In Toronto, many pro-choice women were strongly pro-union and were dismayed by his choice of Morris Manning, who also represented Merv Lavigne for his famous anti-labour Charter challenge to the mandatory payment of union dues to the Ontario public service union.
But Morgentaler treated the supporters much the same way he treated governments and religious groups: he ignored them and, as Dunphy points out, went on to achieve some truly dramatic courtroom victories with these lawyers.
One such victory was Morgentaler's acquittal in 1984 by an Ontario jury. The case was his fourth such acquittal. The three earlier ones were in Quebec, although the first had been overturned by the Quebec Court of Appeal, which substituted a prison sentence instead; Morgentaler served ten months.
At the victory party Morris Manning's wife, the Toronto physician Linda Rapson, "brought the house down" in a speech where she described how the lawyer would come home and declare: "That little prick is going to drive me up the wall." Morgentaler roared with laughter along with his supporters.
The incident is telling because it shows how Morgentaler, by his character and achievements, almost forces people to respect him even while he irritates the hell out of them. He seems to extract respect from people much as he extracted new legal regimes from recalcitrant governments.
And that's what shines through in Dunphy's book. At times Morgentaler seems unworthy of our respect. Whenever he wins, he boasts and brags; when he loses, he whines and moans. According to Dunphy, he'd routinely keep several love affairs going at once, and was not above using the pro-choice women's movement as a hunting ground for new conquests; he was much assisted in his efforts by ever-increasing fame.
But in spite of all this, you put down the book feeling a huge admiration for Morgentaler and his achievements. He's a man who's done exactly what he wants to, and who rarely bothers to stop and consult with others along the way. It's an admirable anti-authoritarian stance, and even more compelling because it seems to work so well.
Dunphy has been enormously privileged to have had access to an audio-tape diary Morgentaler's been keeping for some years, and she quotes many of his private impressions about people and events.
They're remarkable passages because they often show how right Morgentaler's clear-headed vision was about many things-whether it's the law, his personal life, or even the day-to-day business problems of running a bunch of abortion clinics.
And it's almost refreshing to see how mundane Morgentaler's clinic business hassles are. For instance, he has a huge bust-up with his brother and partner Mike, who saved his life in the camps. The spat starts over whether they should buy a new phone system.
Morgentaler's stunned when his Toronto clinic employees announce they're organizing a union-he treats them well, he gives them bonuses and gifts, he says. "Give us overtime, not bonuses," they tell him. So Morgentaler uses all the typical boss tricks to shut the union down and eventually it's decertified.
And some of his employee doctors work long enough to find out all the trade secrets before going off to open their own competing clinics-this is a lucrative business, Dunphy shows. A doctor can take home up to $2,000 a day doing abortions.
We also see him dropping acid, going to primal scream therapy and to the Club Med for frequent vacations. We see his custody battles, marriages, divorces, petty fights with his relatives, kids, other doctors, religious fanatics, and supporters.
While Dunphy's done a competent writing job here, her publishers have done her a major disservice with their very poor editing.
The pages are full of mistakes and minor inaccuracies which any plain reading should have caught. Doubly annoying is Dunphy's liberal use of "[sic]" whenever some minor irregularity occurs in quoted material. If you're going to establish these anal-retentive ground rules for others, you'd better follow them yourself.
You don't, for example, drive on the "Macdonald-Cartier Freeway between Montreal and Ottawa," nor are members of the press called "the fifth estate"; moreover, David Jenkins is not "the P.E.I. justice minister"; he's a justice of the province's Supreme Court.
Dunphy's isn't the first biography of Morgentaler: Eleanor Wright Pelrine, now deceased, wrote Morgentaler: The Doctor Who Wouldn't Turn Away in 1975. The book sold poorly, and according to Dunphy, she had a deal to split the book's proceeds with Morgentaler. He later complained he never got a cent from her.
Dunphy doesn't reveal whether she has a similar deal with the good doctor, but let's hope her book isn't the last word on this complex and historic figure. 

Michael Fitz-James is the editor of Canadian Lawyer magazine and medical-legal columnist for the Medical Post.