As you likely know, health care is not equal across Canada. Although Canada’s health care system is “universal,” many people and groups either don’t have equal access or don’t receive positive and affirming care. This is creates real health disparities across the country.
If you are like us, you want all people to have access to the best sexual and reproductive health care, it’s one of our main priorities at Action Canada! When we talk about access to health care, we’re referring to the ability of people like you or the people in your communities to get the services they need, when they need it. Access to health care is important because it has a major effect on overall health.
Access to abortion needs to be central when we talk about maternal health or reproductive health care.
Barriers to abortion services don’t curb the number of abortions, they just drive up the number of unsafe abortions, jeopardize people’s health by delaying care or severely impact people’s lives by
imposing travel fees and other financial burdens on them. That’s why access to abortion is always at the forefront of our work.
We are grateful for donors like you who believe, as we do, that access to abortion and the right to health care are human rights worth upholding and defending!
We can never be equal if some of us are denied the basic right to make decisions for ourselves, for our health, and for our families.
Providing direct support and using this information to drive institutional level “systems change” has been proven to work time and time again. That’s why Action Canada’s policy work is informed by the calls on our national 24/7 toll free support and referral Access Line and requests for emergency financial assistance. This offers us a window into the countless ways barriers to abortion exist in Canada.
Supporting people as they navigate incredibly complicated scenarios pushes us to pursue the policy level work we believe will have the greatest impact. One example: hearing from folks over
and over again who need to travel hundreds of kilometers away made it clear we needed to do everything we could to make access to abortion in rural and remote areas a reality.
And now we have cause to celebrate! If you’ve had a chance to read our Annual Report, you may have seen the major gains through our carefully crafted campaign to increase abortion access with
the abortion pill Mifegymiso.
Not only has our campaign put abortion access in the spotlight, it is also giving us a chance to address long-standing barriers with decision makers and health care providers across the country.
Your support is so important at this very moment. It helps take the evidence we have and real-life challenges we hear to the next level, just like we’ve done with the abortion pill campaign. Please make a monthly or single special gift today!
Advocating for better access to the abortion pill matters so much. Because more and more people will have abortion access outside of major cities and integrated into their primary care. Just imagine
having access at your family doctor’s office, at the midwifery clinic around the corner or offered by your local nurse practitioner. That is the “universal” health care we are working towards.
We have been taking a critical look into why the roll-out of the abortion pill, while steady, is not happening evenly across Canada and working hard to correct the course.
Every day, we chip away at all that needs to happen to reach universal access to abortion in Canada. This means engaging with professional colleges and health leaders to encourage adding medical abortion to different health care providers’ scope of practice, or talking to government offcials from coast to coast to coast to continue our push for universal cost coverage and to encourage them to take swift, decisive steps towards real access. Just this month, Quebec announced steps to make it easier for health care providers to prescribe Mifegymiso. This is a really big deal!
Different people and communities face different challenges in accessing health care services. It’s true for all reproductive and sexual health services (including abortion, pre-natal care, cancer care, contraception counseling, etc.).
If we care about access to health care, we have to care about what stands in the way of good health and good care. It is also why we are serious about tackling other major but sometimes less talked about barriers.
We cannot achieve real victories without thinking about the social factors that affect health (or, the “social determinants of health”), about reproductive justice, about laws, policies and school curricula and about what med students learn during their studies. We are up for that challenge!
Harm reduction, equity, stigma-free, anti-racism, LGBTQ2S inclusivity…these are themes you may have seen over the years in our social media posts, updates and interviews. Throughout our work, we make sure to speak to what can impact different people’s health, what can make a visit to the doctor a challenge, lead to wrongful diagnoses, higher rates of maternal mortality, or even prevent someone from being able to see a doctor.
Your support has meant that we have been able to pour energy, capacity and time into building resources for health care providers so they can learn how to offer more inclusive and affirming care to
their patients; to get ourselves informed and ready to oer direct support and information to different people and communities on a
variety of sexual health topics; to develop materials for educators who teach sex-ed in our classrooms and communities; to work with policy makers across issues to speak up about structural barriers to good health.
Your support continues to be so urgently needed! The Access Line and Norma Scarborough Emergency Fund are entirely funded through the generosity of our loyal and committed donors.
Here is what your support makes possible:
1. High quality accurate and non-judgmental information to the public, including to our callers on the Access Line;
2. Engagement with health care providers who offer the care people need;
3. Training of educators across the country to deliver high quality, evidence-based sexual health education that is framed around human rights; and
4. Engagement at all levels of government to push for policy level change that builds upon knowledge gained through the general public, health care providers and educators.
Click here to make a donation today!