Morgentaler v Borowski: Abortion, the Charter, and the Courts

W. Bruce Wrigley is a fixed-income and derivative products salesman in
the Treasury Department Union Bank of Switzerland (Canada).

In this book, Morton explores the impact of the Charter of Rights and
Freedoms on the courts as well as on other aspects of Canadian society.
Morton does this by tracing the judicial history of abortion in the
Canadian courts through an account of Dr. Henry Morgentaler’s and
Joseph Borowski’s opposing—but often simultaneous—court challenges
to Canadian abortion law.

Morton develops a number of theses about the Charter’s impact. For
example, he finds that “The Charter itself has been a strongly
Americanizing force in Canadian law and politics. . . . Indeed at times
Canadians seem more American than Americans about their rights.” But
the author and others assert that this “rights talk” has other
implications. The assertion of rights can become “a kind of moral
relativism [which] is the very opposite of the traditional view of
rights as standards of right and wrong that exist independently of
individual or collective opinion.”

Far from being a narrowly legal treatise on the interaction of the
subjects in its title, this book successfully navigates many diverse
streams of modern Canadian society. Morton succinctly blends history,
politics, and biography in this highly readable story of a modern
society’s evolution.