A History of Post-Roe America and Canada: From Intertwined Abortion Battles to Dobbs

The changing landscape on abortion following Dobbs has not only sparked a vigorous debate in the United States, but also abroad. Its recriminalization in America led to an outcry in peer Western democracies, whose leaders widely condemned the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision. Yet the social and historical reasons for this international divide are poorly understood. This Article sheds light on the question through an in-depth comparison of America and Canada from Roe to Dobbs, as the neighboring nations’ abortion histories have been intertwined in intriguing and overlooked ways. When the U.S. Supreme Court decided Roe v. Wade in 1973, it heartened Canadian reformers who repeatedly cited Roe as a model to follow. The Supreme Court of Canada would not decriminalize abortion until 1988 in its landmark Morgentaler decision—fifteen years after Roe. This history, documented with original English- and French-language sources, reveals as much about America as about Canada. If both countries had seemingly converged in liberalizing abortion once their high courts reached these seminal decisions, their paths would markedly diverge in subsequent decades. In America, the pro-choice movement increasingly was on the retreat after Roe as anti-abortion forces gained ground. In Canada, by contrast, the anti-abortion movement gradually collapsed following Morgentaler, as in much of the modern Western world. Still, in each country jurisdictions opposed to abortion tried to regulate it out of existence. It was not before 2016 that Prince Edward Island—the last Canadian province to hold out—joined the rest of the country in allowing abortion. Only a few years later, the U.S. anti-abortion movement succeeded in overturning Roe, leading to the recriminalization of abortion in over a dozen American states in stark contrast to the historical evolution of reproductive rights. Americans seeking to reinvigorate reproductive rights point to Canada as a model to follow in the post-Dobbs era. Canada now protects abortion far better than the neighbor from which it once sought inspiration. This extraordinary historical reversal and role reversal deserves closer attention, as it offers insight into numerous dimensions of the abortion debate.