It was 20 years ago, an ordinary cold January day like today, when the newspaper headlines read that Dr. Henry Morgentaler had won his case and Canadian women had full abortion rights. It seemed impossible.

Until that ruling on Jan. 28, 1988, abortions in clinics were illegal: they could only be performed at certain hospitals and only in the rare cases when a three-doctor committee deemed it appropriate.

I had the unfamiliar sensation (look, I was very young) that everything was swimming in the right direction for women — a notion I have never entertained since, but still, it was a nice moment. “Every child a wanted child” has always been a great slogan but it shone especially brightly that day.

The safer sex years — between the introduction of the birth control pill in the 1960s and the 1988 legalization of abortion — offered a giant, life-encompassing safety net for men and women, a great and glorious insurance policy that we rely on to this day. Only a visionary would have regarded it that way at the time, and now of course, it seems relatively minor. Birth control is a small, sugary pill we occasionally forget to take, or a skin patch that looks strange in the changing room. Abortion rights are our Get Out of Jail Free card that we stow in a back pocket in case we need it, but we hope not to.

Erupting volcanoes

Here I will say something that is rarely said, especially by men who may uncharacteristically not want to draw attention to their victory: birth control and abortion rights have been a sexual volcano for men, one of those volcanoes that never stops erupting. So much more, and better, sex has been had. Men have been having a giant fling for decades, and women, able to relax about the terror of an unwanted pregnancy, have had more and better sex too.

“God, there is sex everywhere and all you need do is reach out,” a woman having a truly lavish time told the journalist Jonathon Green for his book It: Sex Since the Sixties, and that sentence stuck in my head.

You’d think a man would be writing this column celebrating sexual freedoms. Why should I have to be the one to point out the obvious — that men always have an orgasm when they have sex, and women don’t, so why aren’t men celebrating massively this week or at least taking us out to dinner?

Maybe they’re silent out of politeness. Or fear. They may have a point. Maybe they’re throwing a private men’s party, after we’ve gone to bed, or they’re jubilating secretly inside their heads. I would, if I were a man. Honestly, you men, I like you but I am puzzled by your ways.

If only new viruses like HIV and papilloma hadn’t run riot, bringing back the fear of death. But despite the dark side of sex — disease, crime, unwanted pregnancy, and unlimited possibilities for misunderstanding and humiliation — people keep doing it. Professional disapprovers David Frum and Margaret Somerville can cross their legs and “tsk” away in the background till they meet their maker, but the fun will go on.

Sex is private

Thirty-five years of Roe v. Wade and 20 years of R. v. Morgentaler have at least cut down on the number of women dying from fouled-up abortions done with bleach, pesticide, coat hangers, knives and blows to the belly. Women still die this way in North America, depending on the relative wealth of the woman, and millions have died around the world.

But there is less of it now. RU-486, the abortion pill — different from Plan B or the morning-after pill — is a great advance. You need a doctor but you can have your abortion at home in a place where you feel safe. Sex is a private matter; I always thought abortion should be a private matter, too. If Canadian women are allowed access to this drug, mifepristone — available in the U.S. since 2000 and in Europe since 1989 — maybe their abortions will be kept as their own private business, as it should be. But astonishingly, Canada is still in the stone age. Health Canada is strangely reluctant and drug firms fear a right-wing backlash.

I’m not writing about the Morgentaler decision with smugness. No government, Liberal or Conservative, has punished P.E.I. or New Brunswick for violating the Health Act and making it almost impossible for poor women to obtain abortions. Strange people still do creepy things to eat away at abortion rights. They say abortions cause cancer, mental illness and, en masse, post-traumatic stress disorder. Everyone collapses, including you, the father, your parents, siblings and your grandpa.

Political positions

If you ever yearn for the mucky sensation of sticky fingers crawling down your spine, go to Hansard and read MPs discussing Alberta Tory Ken Eppâe(TM)s proposed Unborn Victims of Crime Act, due for a House vote in March. The private member’s (what an appropriate name) bill means murderers should get a lower prison sentence for killing a regular woman than for killing a pregnant woman. Read them say how nice it is when a pregnant lady lets you feel her belly: “I think we’ve all experienced that,” Epp says.

They call the extra murder “fetal homicide” and it’s a cowardly way of introducing the concept that fetuses are people. By extension, there would then exist an elaborate grading system for the value of women’s bodies, fetus-containing women being the most valued, old women the least.

This kind of thing is subterranean in Canada but very public in the United States. It’s odd because the re-criminalization of abortion seems as retrograde as steam-driven typewriters. In a world where we now debate robotic surgery and human cloning, the war against abortion, and not even RU-486 abortion, uses ancient weapons.

Nevertheless, this week you’ll be hearing a lot from the Orwellian Anti-Sex League (Senior Division) about sluttish teenage girls and evil abortion clinics and how disgusting people are who don’t follow their pinched hateful rules about sex before marriage or during marriage or ever.

Just ignore them. Have your own private celebration of the advent of the pill and the Morgentaler win. Send the kids to your mom’s. Wine is good. Dim lighting is very good. “You look fabulous, darling” is a phrase that always works. “Is there anything you can’t do?”

And no one need know. It’s no one’s business but your own.

This Week

Here’s something else that will send colder fingers down your already tender spine. It’s a photo essay that appeared in the New York Times this week.

The Times is not an interesting or courageous paper, but pictures are worth a thousand measly words. It is a series of photos of a female circumcision “event” held at an elementary school in Bandung, Indonesia. The Times reports that 96 per cent of Indonesian families have had their daughters “cut.” It is done to please men.

As the article says, we should be sensitive to other cultures and aware of the realities of the lives of Indonesian women who think they’re doing their daughters a favour. As a feminist, I agree. This is the male desire to control female sexuality, taken to the ultimate conclusion.

And I also say that when I look at those smug women waiting to strip and slice crying little girls, I see a collection of Karla Homolkas. These women harm helpless children to curry favour with men. It’s not an ethnic tradition, it’s a universal tendency. We have them here, we have them there, we have these women everywhere. Hey, they’re just following orders.