Halifax

Reproductive Rights on the High Seas

Panel Discussion about Maritime Law and Medical Abortion featuring Professors Aldo Chircop and Joanna Erdman

7:00pm
- 9:00pm
Tuesday November 18 2014

Access to abortion in Atlantic Canada is limited to surgical abortion facilities in a few hospitals in NB and NS and one clinic in NL. This creates significant access barriers in the region, including barriers of travel, cost, and delay. These access barriers offer reason to promote the availability of medical abortion in Canada. In medical abortion, drugs rather than surgery are used to terminate a pregnancy. Canadians, however, cannot benefit from this innovation. Although registered in 57 other countries, the drug mifepristone has yet to be approved and distributed in this country. When used with misoprostol, mifepristone is a safe and effective method of abortion. Moreover, a great promise of medical abortion is that it may be provided safely earlier in pregnancy by a more diverse set of providers in a broader range of facilities. When mifepristone is approved for use in Canada, the advocacy task will be to ensure that regulation designed for safe surgical services does not impede its promise of access. The goal will be to ensure that medical abortion becomes available in health facilities beyond hospitals and specialized clinics, and that health practitioners beyond physicians (including nurse practitioners and midwives) are trained and authorized to administer it. 

The objective of this project is to share information about medical abortion and to generate collective thinking on how this innovative abortion method can improve abortion access in Atlantic Canada.

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