Everyone deserves to have full control over their reproductive health, access to appropriate healthcare, and be treated with dignity. Unfortunately, this isn’t the case for some people in Canada when they are seeking abortion care.
We met with an expert from the United Nations to discuss the impact of racism in our healthcare system, including abortion access. Check out our analysis and recommendations on what we have to do to ensure everyone has equal access to abortion and maternal healthcare.
Why the UN Special Rapporteur’s visit to Canada matters
The UN Special Rapporteur on Contemporary Forms of Racism is visiting Canada from September 28 to October 9, 2026. During the country visit, the Special Rapporteur will travel to Ottawa, Montréal, Québec City, Toronto, Victoria and Vancouver and meet with government representatives, civil society organizations, communities and other stakeholders to learn about experiences of racism and racial discrimination across Canada.
Special Rapporteurs are independent human rights experts appointed by the UN Human Rights Council to examine, monitor and report on human rights issues and situations around the world. Country visits provide an important opportunity for these experts to hear directly from communities and civil society organizations and to assess how human rights commitments are being implemented in practice.
For Canadian civil society organizations, engaging with these processes is an important part of human rights advocacy. Country visits create a space to bring evidence, expertise and lived experiences to international human rights mechanisms, particularly on issues that may not be adequately addressed through domestic processes. The findings and recommendations that emerge from these visits can also provide an important advocacy tool for civil society to press for concrete policy and institutional change and to follow up on government commitments.
Action Canada’s engagement
Action Canada for Sexual Health and Rights has engaged with the UN human rights system for many years as part of our advocacy for sexual and reproductive rights and health in Canada and globally. We have worked with UN Special Procedures, Treaty Bodies and other human rights mechanisms to document gaps in the fulfillment of human rights and to bring attention to issues that require government action.
As part of the Special Rapporteur’s country visit, Action Canada participated in consultations with the Special Rapporteur to share evidence from our work and highlight how racism can be embedded within Canada's healthcare systems.
Our experience shows that racism in healthcare is not limited to individual experiences of discrimination. It can also be embedded in rules, systems, billing practices, documentation requirements and institutional practices that determine who can access care, at what cost and within what timeframe.
Through our Access Line and Access Fund, we see how these barriers disproportionately affect newcomers, racialized communities and people with precarious immigration status. Between July 2025 and June 2026, the Access Line supported 4653 unique users, 400 clients through the Access Fund. The barriers people encounter often intersect with immigration status, language, income, employment and geography, creating additional obstacles to accessing essential sexual and reproductive healthcare.
These concerns are not new. Action Canada has raised related issues through UN processes, including the Universal Periodic Review and Treaty Body reviews. However, persistent gaps demonstrate the importance of continued international scrutiny, recommendations and follow-up alongside domestic advocacy.
What we brought to the consultation
Action Canada called for concrete measures to address systemic barriers to healthcare, including:
- Eliminating health-coverage waiting periods.
- Ensuring that immigration status does not create barriers to essential healthcare services.
- Strengthening culturally safe and anti-racist maternal healthcare for Indigenous and Black women.
- Ending discriminatory or disproportionate healthcare pricing.
- Increasing transparency around healthcare pricing and the policies that govern it.
- Providing accessible, multilingual information about sexual and reproductive health services.
- Ensuring international students have adequate health coverage.
- Protecting migrant workers’ access to healthcare.
- Establishing a statutory basis for a National Mechanism for Implementation, Reporting and Follow-Up (NMIRF) to support the effective implementation and monitoring of human rights recommendations.
Why follow-up matters
A country visit is not an end point. The Special Rapporteur will publish a report with findings and recommendations following the visit. For civil society, this creates another opportunity to use international human rights recommendations as part of ongoing advocacy, to monitor government responses and to push for implementation.
Meaningful engagement with UN human rights mechanisms requires sustained participation: bringing evidence and local experiences into international processes, following recommendations after they are issued, and connecting international accountability to national advocacy.
For Action Canada, engaging in these processes is part of ensuring that the experiences we see through our frontline work are reflected in national and international human rights discussions, and that recommendations translate into concrete improvements in access to healthcare and the fulfillment of sexual and reproductive rights for all.