Morgentaler and me

In the summer of 1974 I made another of my leaps of faith: I would write "Man From Atlan" , the story of my past lives that had begun with 'Search for the Soul's Mate' http://manfromatlan.blogspot.com/2007/12/search-for-souls-mate-i-didnt-use-to.html
First, we had to find a new place, so I did, a flat on the 3rd floor of 85 Harbord Street, Toronto. The landlord, an Irish Canadian, was tickled I was writing a book there, and even threw in a chest of drawers for a bottle of Jim Beam.
So I threw myself into writing; getting up early to go jogging, then, fuelled by peanut butter and rolls from the local bakery, would write for 10-12 hours straight. The writing process is straightforward for me. Get in the space, write. Once you start, don't stop till you've finished. That took 3 months. The same happened when we moved to London, and, filled with the memories and spiritual experiences that flowed through, wrote my second book The Way of Atlan.
But for now, I'm writing about Dr. Henry Morgentaler, who's just received the Order of Canada, our highest civil honour. Dr. Morgentaler single-handedly assailed the legal system which made abortions in Canada illegal. Even though he was imprisoned in Quebec and then tried again in Ontario for performing abortions, in 1988 the Supreme Court ruled in his favour that abortions could not be denied by Canada's Health Care system. And this happened in the house where I wrote my book.
Around about the time I finished writing Man From Atlan in 1974, 85 Harbord St. was taken over by the mortgage holder, a lawyer called Morris Manning, who courteously allowed us to stay until we moved to England in 1975. He then leased the 2nd and 3rd floors to his client Dr. Morgentaler, who set up his first abortion clinic in Toronto. The previous owner, angry at this turn of events, then leased his next door property, 87 Harbord St. to a Christian Evangelist, Ken Campbell, who proceeded to harangue women coming to Morgentaler's clinic next door, which made it interesting because both properties shared the same entrance, and demonstrations and counter demonstrations roiled outside those doors for quite a while.
I believe that women have the right to have an abortion. I also know it is the killing of an unborn child, and that there is a karmic price to pay. Over and over in my healing I have seen the karmic consequences and pain carried by women and men by the decision to have a child or not, to be responsible for the love and welfare of a child or not. This is not to blame anyone, neither the woman nor the doctor who carries out the abortion. But in my long spiritual and healing practice I have seen many things concerning Birth and Abortion and have a duty to share what I learned with everyone who wants to know.
I have 5 children and from the time they were conceived, knowing their spirits, it never was an option for us to abort, even though we had to go through a lot of karma with that choice. I respect that many women make that choice out of necessity and it is never an easy one. But the fact is that they were not informed that it put at risk their chances of having subsequent children or might have problem pregnancies or children with a higher degree of cerebral palsy or other illnesses. That the hormonal disruption would increase the chances of cancer (Statisticians on both sides argue this point, but my own observations support this) And spiritually, subsequent children often turned out to have incredible karma with the mother. The karma was almost non-existent when there was a miscarriage, but extremely heavy when it was an abortion.
The Way of Atlan teaches the sacredness of birth, the life lived from the time of conception, and the karmic responsibility that entails. It also accepts that there might be a time when abortion is necessary, and that while there should not be any impediment to it, it could not be just a clinical procedure without any sense of the pain that was being caused, or felt. That I could place my hand on a woman's root chakra and ask if she had been pregnant before, or had an abortion, was a reflection of the energy loss I felt there. So, I could heal that pain, and release the woman and the spirit of the unborn child.
I could also not judge Henry Morgentaler. In an interview at http://www.theglobeandmail.com/series/morgentaler/ he revealed that his mother, who died at Auschwitz, was distant from him and he never felt that she had loved him at all or as she loved her other children. And I could only feel compassion, knowing that this is exactly the way that children of abortion feel when their spirits are torn from their bodies, and how much pain is being carried forward into the future.
I could also feel the irony; the home which was such an important part of my spiritual journey, was now an abortion clinic. The raccoon with whom I would share my peanut butter and rolls on the balcony, was probably being fed fetuses by Dr. Morgentaler, who after all said they were just 'clumps of tissue' (My savage sense of humour, sorry)
In 1984, The Toronto Women's book store was burned down. It was believed that the target was the clinic above it.
In 1992, the building was destroyed by an arsonist.
That was the year our daughter Arune was conceived, and I decided to move on to the next stage, our Spiritual Journey to the United States http://manfromatlan.blogspot.com/2007/12/spiritual-journey-to-u.html
We choose the direction of our lives, and the journey. And now, our journey moves on again.