Henry Morgentaler

Henry Morgentaler ( born March 19, 1923 in Łódź, † May 29, 2013 in Toronto ), a native Henekh Morgentaler, was a Canadian doctor who sat the unrestricted right to abortion in Canada.

Life

Morgentaler was born as the son of Polish Jews Golda Nitka and Josef Morgentaler in Łódź. The Nazis forced him and his family in the Lodz ghetto and brought them later to Auschwitz, where he and his brother were separated from their parents. His parents were murdered and he was later made ​​it to the Dachau concentration camp, where he was liberated by the U.S. Army in 1945.

After studying medicine in Germany, he emigrated in 1950 together with his then- wife, the poet Chava Rose color, to Canada. There he worked as a general practitioner and championed the right of women to abortion. In 1969 he opened in Montreal Canada's first abortion clinic whose activity was contrary to the then laws and provoked fierce opposition from anti-abortion activists.

After several arrests, convictions and prison sentences in the 1970s, a conviction from 1983 in Ontario was finally forwarded to the Supreme Court of Canada. He declared in 1988 that the Canadian abortion law was unconstitutional. Since then, in Canada the unrestricted right to abortion applies.

Morgentaler was from 1968 to 1999 the first President of the Humanist Association of Canada ( Humanist Association of Canada ) and in the period following their Honorary President. In 1983 he was attacked by the militant anti-abortion Augusto Dantas with a hedge trimmer. The journalist Judy Rebick prevented the attack and Morgentaler remained intact. In May 1992, a bomb attack on the Morgentaler Clinic in Toronto.

Honors

1975 elected him the American Humanist Association for Humanist of the Year. In 2005, Henry Morgentaler was awarded an honorary doctorate from the University of Western Ontario. In July 2008 he was appointed Member of the Order of Canada, the appointment was controversial in public. So was, for example, former politician and awardees Gilbert Finn at the ceremony morning thaler his medal in protest.