If you’re a woman of a certain age with daughters, grand-daughters, nieces or other younger female loved ones, the overturning of Roe v. Wade in the United States is not only frightening but difficult to believe. I marched in pro-choice rallies as a teenager in the 1980s — if you’d told me that in 40 years the United States would take a huge step backwards in terms of reproductive rights, I might have had difficulty believing it. It’s now easier to obtain an assault-style weapon in many jurisdictions in the U.S. — and apparently to carry out mass shootings given their frequency, with victims who are often children — than it is to terminate an unwanted pregnancy thanks to supposedly “pro-life” Supreme Court justices and politicians.

As Canadians, it’s easy to reassure ourselves that it can’t happen here … but is that a false sense of security?

Today in The Conversation Canada, political science professors James Kelly, Francesca Scala and Stephanie Paterson of Concordia University delve into whether Canadian abortion rights are under threat. In the near future, they argue, a Canadian woman’s right to an abortion is probably safe, but there are danger spots on the horizon because Canada regulates abortion as a health issue, which has advantages and disadvantages. “The procedure is situated within a clear regulatory framework that potentially protects against restrictive policies,” they write. “Yet there remains no legal or legislative requirement to provide abortion services.”

Also today

• Canadians support accepting more newcomers but we need a more equitable, rights-based approach
• Canada needs to build more affordable housing for newcomers
• 1 in 4 people experience pain during sex, but research excludes the needs of the LGBTQ+ community

All the best,