Therapeutic Abortion Committee

Therapeutic Abortion Committees (commonly known as TACs) were committees established under the Canadian Criminal Code. Each committee consisted of three medical doctors who would decide whether a request for an abortion fit within the exception to the criminal offence of procuring a miscarriage, i.e. performing an abortion. The Criminal Code only permitted lawful abortion if continuation of a pregnancy would cause a woman medical harm, as certified by a TAC. The TACs were almost always composed of men, due to fewer women practicing medicine and even fewer having these types of high level positions. These restrictions on abortion were struck down as unconstitutional by the Supreme Court of Canada in its decision in R v Morgentaler in 1988.

Prior to 1968, abortion was a criminal offence in Canada. Any woman who sought an abortion was potentially committing a criminal offence. If a doctor performed an abortion on compassionate or medical grounds, the doctor ran the risk of being prosecuted under the Criminal Code.

In many cases, judges were willing to convict but juries were unwilling to condemn any qualified medical doctor acting in good faith with the intention to protect the health of a patient.

In 1968, the federal Minister of Justice, Pierre Trudeau, introduced the Criminal Law Amendment Act, 1968-69 to amend the Criminal Code in many respects, including in relation to abortion. The bill introduced the concept of Therapeutic Abortion Committees, which could approve abortions for medical reasons. The committees were based in hospitals and had to be composed of three doctors. The doctor who proposed to perform an abortion could not be a member of the committee which considered the request.

Following the passage of the Criminal Law Amendment Act, 1968–69, the provisions dealing with abortion read as follows:

These were the provisions of the law which the Supreme Court ruled to be unconstitutional in R v Morgentaler.

Abortion clinics were illegal under this law; in Québec only, authorities concluded in the 1970s that the law was unenforceable after a number of unsuccessful criminal cases against doctors. Most notably Dr. Henry Morgentaler openly operated clinics as a form of civil disobedience in order to establish a judicial test case based on the legal defence of necessity.

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