Providing Care, Defending Choice - Dr. Renee Hall Speaks Out

In this premiere episode of Choice Chat, host Tara sits down with Dr. Renée Hall, a veteran abortion provider and contraception advocate. With over 25 years in the field, Dr. Hall shares her personal journey, the challenges of navigating stigma, and the urgent need for reproductive health education in Canada. From the impact of political climates to the closure of the Bagshaw Clinic, they explore how access, funding, and education intersect in the fight for reproductive justice. 

This conversation is a powerful call to protect bodily autonomy and vote with reproductive rights in mind.

Thanks for listening to Choice Chat, a Humanist Canada podcast about choice, dignity, and reproductive justice. We’re glad you’re here. Do you have a story to share? Do you want to suggest a topic? Email us at choicechat@humanistcanada.ca or connect with us on social media. We look forward to hearing from you.

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Transcript

PROVIDING CARE, DEFENING CHOICE – DR. RENEE HALL SPEAKS OUT!

Host: And welcome to Choice Chat, the podcast where we explore the complexities of abortion, sexual and reproductive health with empathy, clarity and an inclusive humanist lens. Our goal is to foster dialogue, share resources and empower individuals to make informed decisions. I'm a member of Humanist Canada and your Host, Tara. And let's get started. I can't wait for you to meet our guest, Dr. Renee Hall.

Dr. Hall  is a clinical associate professor at the University of British Columbia who's been working in the area of family planning in Vancouver for 25 years. She's the medical director of Willow Reproductive Health Centre and provides first and second trimester surgical and medical abortion at the CARE program at BC Women's Hospital, Every Women's Health Centre, Elizabeth Bagshaw Clinic and Kelowna General Hospital's Gynecology Services Clinic.

She's the lead on the UBC Continuing Professional Development, IUD and Contraceptive Implant Training Program and assisted in the development of the National Abortion Federation Canada's Medical Abortion Training Program and is the IUD Whisperer. Welcome, Dr. Hall . Did I miss anything in introducing you?

Dr. Hall: No, that's great. Thank you so much. So glad to be here.

Host: Thank you for giving up your time to share your expertise and your insights with us. I'll be honest, I have been a pro-choice advocate my entire life and have had so many conversations with people about abortion, but I've got to say, this is my first opportunity to speak with an abortion care provider. I'm thrilled to ask questions and get your point of view and I'm so curious. The first thing I'm wondering is what drew you to this work and what keeps you doing the work?

Dr. Hall: When you're in med school, you have to go through all of the different areas of medicine and you have to go to do orthopedics and urology and internal medicine and you go through all these different rotations. And what I started to realize is the thing that I'm doing at three o'clock in the morning, but I'm still absolutely fascinated and don't even realize what time it is and just love what's going on-that's the one for me. So most of the subjects I was like, gosh, when is this shift over? And then for gynecology, I just absolutely loved what was going on. But the second part with abortion provision is the political and social implications, there was so much more in there too, out of interest intellectually, academically and politically. So there was so much to it that drew me to it for sure. I think also just the feeling about choice and the importance of reproductive choice came even before med school. So I think that was always there. And the autonomy of women and their ability to make a decision about their body, that's always been in the background and then learning in medicine about the subject and being so interested in the subject also just solidified it for me.

Host: Okay, amazing. In terms of that political aspect and bodily autonomy aspect, you're working in the space that is politically charged and emotionally charged. And there's still a ton of stigma around abortion. How do you navigate that personally in your day to day?

Dr. Hall: Hard to figure out and I find that at different phases of my life, I've had different approaches to it. When I was young, very raw, very out there and wanting to advocate, wanting my voice to be heard, not that anyone necessarily wanted to hear me as a young new person, but I was there! And then...when I went into med school and was learning, it was just so much focus on the medicine part of it and the educational aspect of it. So I was a little bit separated from the political side of things. Then when I went into practice and I'm re-engaging with the reality of it in the world and when I first started 25 years ago, they said, ‘okay, here's the bulletproof vest if you need it…it's over here in the clinic….there's a wig in this corner…so if you need to run out of the clinic’, if you'd like to…’, that's how it started. It's not like that anymore but in the back 25 years ago, I was like, whoa, just facing the reality after being so deep in the medicine of it for so long. Yeah. Realizing, oh, wait a minute. No, this is serious business. And my teacher, one of my teachers, Gary Romalis was shot and stabbed and him telling me the stories of exactly how that happened and me having to really sit and say, ‘Am I okay with this? and ‘Can I move forward to do this?’ and really having to do a self-check with it. And I realized that it's just so important to me for people to have that reproductive choice and that access to reproductive choice that I wanted to continue doing it. 

And then when you're visually looking outside your clinic and seeing protesters outside, it was just dealing with that. And then in your personal life, okay, now I have children. So then when I got older, I have children and the school, I'm going to these parent teacher things and meeting all the other parents and they're like, ‘what do you do’? Right. And trying to figure out, I really want to put my children in a position where everyone in their school knows that their mom's an abortion provider too? So at different times in my life, I've wanted to be careful about what I say versus now as I've gotten older, I've been much more open about it. And I feel like it's also weeded out people very easily for me. And it's like, ‘Hi, what do you do’? ‘I'm an abortion provider’. They scoff, they turn away. I'm like, fabulous. I didn't have to spend like a long time figuring out I don't want to know that person. Yeah. And then now my children are older and they're more supportive and understand what I do is really important to me. So it's definitely different phases of life. It's had different meaning for me personally.

Host: I was wondering that, not that I go to very many dinner parties, but about dinner party conversations or in the school parking lot, waiting to pick up your kids. If that's something that you feel safe telling people that you do. I was preparing for our chat today and reading some of the articles online. First of all, I want to give our condolences about the announced closure of the Bagshaw Clinic. I am so sorry to hear about that. I understand that is devastating news to the people who work there and I'm sure to the community and I would ask you a little more about that if you're okay with it. 

But in doing that reading, I was jumping to articles that were linked to other articles and looking back at the stories about Dr. Romalis and for our listeners who may not know or remember, Dr. Romalis is a doctor, an abortion provider who was shot in his kitchen, if I'm correct, in ‘92, somewhere around there, survived, nearly bled to death by a protester or by a forced birth anti-choice activist, almost bled to death, survived that and then eight years later was stabbed in the back outside of his clinic in Vancouver. So I imagine especially providing, and I didn't realize that he was your teacher, so you have this personal connection. And I was just imagining that in BC, in Vancouver in particular, that there may be some particular sensitivities and justified fear around your safety as an abortion provider. So I was really curious to ask you about that.

Dr. Hall: I think having Gary as a teacher was inspirational as far as his experience in the U.S. He saw deaths because of people trying to do their own abortions. He saw people with four children at home who just could not face another pregnancy and all this terrible infection that they faced because of trying to do something that was illegal or somewhere on the street. The reality is that when abortion is made illegal, you don't decrease one single abortion. All you do is increase the illegal dangerous ones. That's it. The demand is still there and people still feel that they are so desperate that they do what they have to do. And then watching him continue work after all of these things happened to him, because that's how important that he felt it was when he had watched people dying over something that's essentially a five minute procedure that has a similar complication rate to a dental procedure…leaving children without their mother, that sort of thing. 

That really helped to move me forward. And I've never so far faced any of the same sort of things that he has, but for sure all of what's going on in the US has emboldened the forced birther type voices up here. And even the week after Elizabeth Bagshaw closed, there was someone who posted that they felt that they were responsible because they had been protesting outside of Elizabeth Bagshaw the week before. They're like, ‘see what I've done…the Lord's work!’ that sort of thing. It's making people feel more vulnerable what's going on in the States, but we're still absolutely working passionately and working so hard to try to keep access to abortion open and actually improving it, if anything. 

And that's where this whole Bagshaw thing is leading to. The clinics were born out of feminist ideals, these individual clinics that came so many years ago and this beautiful movements that brought this forward to allow access for people to this work. But the problem that's happening is that the College of Physicians and Surgeons is having more more stringent rules around how these clinics, any surgical private clinic, is regulated. They want it to be like so safe, but to the point that it's difficult to meet their standards in these old buildings and so all of us are having trouble with that. So the Every Woman's Health Centre, Elizabeth Bagshaw Clinic, Willow is having trouble with funding and started to become like, we need a better idea moving forward. And we wanted all of us to be moving forward toward this better idea, which we have this idea of a single center that's still based on feminist ideals. Still it's in own individual community clinic out there, not hospital-based and not run by a bunch of bureaucrats or anything like that. 

So same sort of idea, but just one big place where we can have a voice together and work together. And then Bagshaw announced the closure. Just, was so sad that. And now we're at this moment, even just this morning, we've been on the phone trying to make sure that we do not interrupt any of the services for abortion. We don't want people waiting more than two weeks. So the other clinics are scrambling to make sure that we'll be able to cover everything. So I just want to reassure everyone that's the case for this region, that we are going to be covering those services with a goal, hopefully, ultimately of being in this one big, beautiful centre and be able to even increase service and training also for other healthcare providers.

Host: Oh incredible… for listeners, Bagshaw Clinic has been there for 35 years. It's one of three clinics in Vancouver, and you're involved with all three. This announced closure in June is the announced closure, so it's very soon. So that seemed alarming. I'm sure it's very shocking and even traumatizing to the many people involved in running the clinic and to the community. I read in the same article that the Vancouver Coastal Health Authority wants to move away from a clinic model to individual providers providing abortion services. And I was wondering, what's your take on that? How does that movement… am I wrong in that first of all?

Dr. Hall: I just wanted to correct that for sure. So Vancouver Coastal Health is, they've been our affiliates the whole time, so they've always provided some funding for the clinics, but still stayed at a bit of an arms distance, which we, because then we can have our own sort of funky way of being, because abortion clinics are all a little different. And so it's nice, it was a kind of a perfect relationship. And I think that we're seeking something like that moving forward except it's just in that single centre. So their goal as well is that sort of single centre idea too. How the structure will be, I'm not sure, but I know we'll try and make it as much like that sort of arm distance the way it was before. So they're on board with this idea. The issue is, and we have funding moving forward, but the issue is the capital funding in the first place. So that's where it's gonna be a little harder and that we're gonna be advocating for that.

Host: Is there fundraising effort underway that we can point listeners to?

Dr. Hall: What's happened with Elizabeth Bagshaw closing so quick is all of this, we were just starting to talk about it. So now we're like, oh jeez. So we're shocked into this. We better hurry up with this idea if this is what we're gonna be doing and we wanna try to get this idea going. But we don't even have anything to be able to tell you as far as, oh, donate here. Yeah, stay tuned.

Host: We'll watch for that. You're also involved, of course, not only in providing abortion care, but you're deeply involved in contraceptive care too, from IUD insertions to vasectomies. What led you to focus? Maybe it's part of the same answer as before in terms of what led you to focus on reproductive health. What has that part of the journey been like for you?

Dr. Hall: Yeah, so it felt a bit disingenuous to just provide abortion care without trying to prevent it. You know what I mean? It's like trying to provide cancer care or anything else without discussing what we can do to try to decrease the risk of that outcome happening at all. Unintended pregnancy is not exactly the most comfortable thing for people and not talking about it doesn't help prevent anything. You know what I mean? So that's, I felt like. We have so much stigma around abortion and unintended pregnancy to the point that physicians don't even want to talk about it too much. So I just thought I'm going to just go out there and say, look, as an abortion provider, I'm telling you, you need to talk about contraception more. We need to have these discussions with our patients. And we're in this war right now with social media. There's just so much misinformation going on. And honestly, the rates of use of contraception are going down and the rates of use of like rhythm method and those kinds of things are going up, which is fine if this is everybody to their own choice, but they just also need to really understand the numbers and make sure they understand like your risk when you are using fertility awareness methods is about 24% a year. People will get pregnant. It's not small. Yeah. Condoms is 18%, you know what I mean? So just to make sure that people understand that information, it's hard to fight the social media movement against hormonal therapy and hormonal birth control and IUDs and things like that. So it's been an interesting journey most recently with regard to that, but it's definitely a big passion of mine to try to get the word out more about having conversations in general primary care about contraception so that people will remember to always talk about this. 

There's times I've seen patients who were hospitalized for two, three months and nobody talked about contraception with them and they came out with these complicated health issues and are now pregnant, which makes that whole thing so much more complicated. And I'm like, ‘Dude, why did you not talk…?’ to everybody, Internal medicine doctors, everybody, they've just got to get used to anybody in reproductive age bringing up the topic. But everyone's a little uncomfortable with sex so it's just, as much as I can get out my own voice, just saying the words, the terrible word vagina, we need to say these words and you need to be able to talk to our patients and just be open about it.

Host: Yes, and that word, just the word abortion, when I was doing my research and reading about the Bagshaw Clinic, there was actually a link to another CBC article from 2022 and the heading was, Many BC Abortion Providers Still Keep Their Services a Secret to not even have the word visible... Maybe that part, maybe partly social stigma, maybe security focused, it may be for safety reasons. Either way, the effect is the suppression of that language and the suppression of information and the inability of people in need of those services to locate them when they need them or even know that they're available.

Dr. Hall: It's really crazy. It drives me a little crazy. Working in Kelowna, I was working on the website for Interior Health, just trying to make sure that the word abortion appeared and people would know where to get their service because we were getting phone calls all the time in Vancouver for people in Kelowna. I was like, ‘We have an abortion clinic there’. Wow. Yeah. And I remember getting a phone call one day that, or not a phone call, I think it was.. because, you know, it's not safe and these clinics don't necessarily want people to know out there. I’m like, ‘What are you talking about? This is healthcare and they need to know where to get service from!’  It was fixed very quickly. 

They reversed what they were saying, but it was, you just know that there's gotta be some sort of anti-choice sentiment behind that or someone in the background who was like trying to get their digs in. But here's the thing I've found interesting on the journey is if you don't like abortion, if you don't want abortion to happen, then you should be super supportive of all these contraceptive ideas, including free contraception. You should be doing talks yourself about contraception. You should be out there making sure that we have good sexual education in schools. This is what we know decreases abortion, for real. Not laws, because in fact, you just hurt people doing that. They just start doing it to themselves. So we need good sexual education in schools. You need good contraceptive availability and access. And that's the part when I get confused because they'll oppose that too.

Host: I don't understand it!

Dr. Hall: We know for a fact, giving out the free contraception is going to decrease unintended pregnancy. Would you not be supportive of that?

Host: What is the opposition? To women? As to people with uteruses? Or it's based in some religious kind of dogma or sentiment? You're right. Things seem contradictory.

Dr Hall: I did an abortion on a patient who was from Chilliwack, had an IUD in her hand and she went to her doctor and her doctor said, ‘I cannot put that IUD in because there is a possibility that one of its ways of working is that the egg and sperm have already come together and don't implant. To me, that's a mini abortion. I'm not putting IUDs in’. That person couldn't find anyone else to put the IUD in, subsequently became pregnant and actually needed abortion. So I was just like, first of all, that's not how those things work. Second, you actually in fact caused an unintended pregnancy as far as I'm concerned or had a hand in it in some way. You know what I mean? 

Host: Yeah. oh my go …..…

Dr. Hall: …the things I’ve seen. And then the youth pregnancy program was a program that I started when I was younger. So young people who chose to continue their pregnancies we wanted to support them in every way we could. So we created this program where they would come in, they'd get food, they'd have people of the same age who were pregnant and they could do parenting classes. We would have the program where they could meet the social worker, would come to the center. So we did all of this stuff and yet we had them unhappy. They shouldn't have got pregnant in the first place. The same people protesting across, it's actually physically across the street from where the youth pregnancy program was, and wouldn't come to donate their time or help these folks who chose to continue. Would you not support those then who said, ‘Yes, I will continue’? Why don't you spend your time, energy and money into those folks? If that's your feeling, if that's your thing, hypocrisy is frustrating. 

Host: That's the outcome they want purportedly, these live births, and then they don't support those people either. The stigma aspect is so broad. I was thinking about that, getting ready for our talk today. I was reminded that contraception was only legalized in 1969. That's just a few years before I was born. That's not, I like to think not very long ago! Actually, in medicine as a society, we haven't had a long history of access to contraception either. I think that your stories are making me reflect that the stigma isn't just about abortion. It has to do with placing this disproportionate burden on women and people with uteruses.

Dr. Hall: It's control. 

Host: Exactly.

Dr. Hall: Let's call it, let's say, this is about controlling our bodies and telling us what we need to do with them, which has been throughout human history, we've been told what we have to do and how we have to do it with our bodies. And the patriarchy tends to want to tell us what to do with our bodies and giving us the option to choose when we have children, how many children we have the patriarchy is losing that control. If you're really concerned about the fetuses and the children in the States, I'm thinking about this, then they'd be up all in arms up in front of the IVF clinics for every time that they throw away embryos. They should be all upset about that, but they're more concerned about the body that surrounds that fetus. Let's be honest and the ability to control that. And if they were really concerned about the children once they're born, they would be giving more than whatever it is in the States, four to six weeks or something of mat leave, they'd be supporting all those people to care for those children and providing education to those people as well. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, like it's about controlling us as it always has been.

Host: Yeah, exactly. You were just making me think about the quote from Dr. Gunther about when she was declining an opportunity to participate in an interview with the CBC. 

Dr. Hall: I saw that.

Host: Yeah, think I saw you posted it on social media. She wrote a letter in response, declining this interview because she had learned that there was going to be a forced birther perspective given on the interview. She said in her letter that all of science says that abortion is a human right, it's safe, we need to have reproductive options and choice, and that she wasn't going to be participating. And I think it was in that letter where she talked about, we give corpses more say on what to do with their bodies. I'm phrasing it.

Dr. Hall: 100%. No, it's true. You cannot take someone's dying, the taking of their organs to save another person. You're not allowed to do that. You're not allowed to just go for it unless they've given prior permission, unless it's all copacetic. But we're saying that we absolutely should use a woman's body to save that fetus or embryo. I don't even care if you want to call it a person. I don't care if you want to call it a prize winning neurologist. You're forcing someone to use their body to save another person. And we don't even ask a corpse to do that.

Host: Exactly. That crystallized things into a certain perspective for me that there's just no avoiding. There's no way around that understanding that perspective that you just shared that this is really about is control. I was wondering about your holistic focus on both contraception and abortion care services. It struck me reading your bio and the way that it's worded and other things that you've said in interviews and things that you frame abortion within a framework of family planning, which I think is really important. Sometimes I think that now I'm saying it out loud, it seems very obvious, but I think it's something that people maybe lose sight of. 

Dr Hall: They really do.

Host: Do they? OK. 

Dr. Hall: When I meet people, one of the biggest thing our counselors are doing at the time of abortion is trying to de-stigmatize. People come in feeling so badly often, not always, and you certainly don't have to, but sometimes people come in feeling just awful that they've had this abortion, or maybe it's even their second one. And our counselors are like, you have got a lot of fertility and not a lot of luck. Let's be honest, there's a lot of times when many of us have been in situations where we're like, oh geez, Louise, I hope that one didn't stick. And there's some people who are so fertile, it happens every time. And so there's that piece. The other thing is we don't talk about it because of the stigmatization. 

People are under the impression they're the only ones having this procedure. And we are full to the brim at these clinics every single day. It also doesn't help with our outcomes of trying to decrease abortion if we don't talk about it, you know what I mean? If we don't say this is how much it's happening and don't forget that if you do choose this method of birth control, this is where you're gonna face these choices. So it is very stigmatized and people come in not understanding that, you know you see someone on the street with two kids walking along with their family and that's two kids, plus they had an ectopic pregnancy, they had an abortion and they've had one miscarriage. Miscarriage has the same stigmatization, interestingly. Things we can't even help, we don't like to talk to each other about, and people don't realize just how common that is. And they come in feeling horrible, like I'm the only one. And as soon as they mention it, their family members start coming out of the closet. I had a miscarriage too, I had one. And then people start to talk about it a little bit. But that's another one, again, that people feel shame or they hide that topic when it's normal. 

It's a normal part of reproductive life. We can do everything we can to try to decrease abortion, but we're always going to need it. There's always these very dangerous and medical situations where we'll need it, like for ectopic pregnancy, for miscarriage. And to clarify for everybody, we don't want a law. I know that they're talking about, that's negative. The fact that people are saying there's no law in Canada. I don't want the law involved in my healthcare. This is what the problem is in the States. We don't have a law around appendectomies. We don't have a law around heart surgery and stuff like that. We don't need a law around abortion. This is something between you and your doctor that you guys need to figure out. 

Because when politicians get involved, stuff like what happened in the States, this governor who came out and said, ‘I believe you can just move those ectopic pregnancies’. Like, what? That's a death sentence. Are you crazy? It's just absolutely ignorant stuff starts coming out when people who are not medical get involved. It's a decision between the patient and her family and the doctors there to assist and help with what they need.

Host: Thank you for bringing that into the conversation because we do hear that even in our circles who are very much concerned with and advocating for people to be able to get the simple healthcare that they need when they need it. And rightly, we're concerned seeing what's happening south of the border. We see the Maple Mega coming here and that rhetoric and everything and the fervor building and like you said earlier, people being emboldened to talk in this way or to threaten in this way. I do hear that sometimes in our circles too around the status in Canada is that abortion was decriminalized and now it lives in this gray area that's outside the law, which as you point out, all other medical procedures are too. And this is a good thing in a way because it's outside the law that makes it safe from the law or from actors with- 

Dr. Hall: Political discourse. 

Host: Exactly. And from-I used the word activist before, is not appropriate. It's not the name for those folks. It's an insult to activists everywhere, but those anti-choice force-birther people. I was going to ask you, picking up on that thread then, what are the barriers that you see right now for either your patients or for the other physicians that you train in terms of abortion access or contraception access? What are you seeing about the state of access in Canada right now 

Dr Hall: We have areas where things are very accessible, free contraception here in BC, yay for us, but there's a lot of other provinces that do not have that. And even in BC, there's these little sort of deserts of abortion care where everyone has to travel out of the community. The wonderful thing that happened in 2017 was the medication abortion came to Canada and it gives the opportunity for even rural physicians and other people to have access to provide abortion care for their patients. And I think where we need to go next with that is having a concerted training program. We do have one that you can choose to be a part of at the National Abortion Federation Canada, which is now called Abortion Care Canada. And that's a great program. It would be nice if it was a part of regular primary care training and if people wanted to opt out, I suppose they could opt out for sure, but you still have to have some understanding around contraception and unintended pregnancy as an issue in general. And then having training as well for the doctors that are out there to feel more comfortable with how to provide medical abortion in detail. It can be very simple for sure, absolutely, but it's nice to have a proper course to just go through because when difficulties happen, it's just nice to get a full proper training. We do have some support that we provide throughout the province as well for physicians to call us in. It's called the race line, R-A-C-E, and they can call us anytime if they have a case that they wanna discuss. So that's in the right direction, but it would be nice to amp up our training so that our physicians can feel comfortable in providing for their patients when they need to. 

The other part that's really hard to address is the same stigmas that happen in regular society, medical people are not immune to, and trying to say it more, trying to speak it more, having podcasts like this, just trying to be able to make it a part of regular discourse so that physicians as well feel more comfortable to be able to provide in their practice and that this is just a regular part of everyday healthcare. So I'm doing my little bit. I just go out there as much as I can saying, ‘hi, I'm an abortion provider. Let's talk about contraception’. And we do these little presentations and things.

Host: Amazing. Walk us through a little bit. What is the typical training that a physician would have coming into practice?

Dr. Hall: So if you're gynecologist, they go through this abortion period of time, about four weeks, where they learn how to do a proper aspiration of the uterus, used to be called D&C. And you could still, as an obstetrician gynecologist, opt out of that, which boggles my mind. I don't know how you can provide OB-GYN care and not have a good and full understanding of abortion provision, but that's just me. But when it comes to primary care, which is the first point of contact, there isn't necessarily a clear program or period of time that people are trained in it. So that's the part where it's a little lacking. I did a lot lecture for the residents once a year I'll do a little lecture for them, but one lecture I feel like there definitely should be a little bit more particularly since it's one in three Canadian women who have an abortion in their reproductive lifetime. That's a lot of patients that you're gonna be seeing who are potentially facing this issue. And so I do think that it's important for everybody working in primary care to get some training.

Host: It's mind boggling. One in three and yet all in secret. All in secret. Nobody talking. Like these one out of every three people is a lot of people.

Dr. Hall: The amount of angst and sadness and fear and everything that goes around it. And every now and again, I'm seeing young people who are coming in, just got to get this done. Okay. And they don't have that guilt and they don't have the stigma around it. And I'm like, yes, that's how I think there was one show on TV I was watching and this guy was reeling over the fact that his girlfriend was pregnant and what to do and my gosh, and like they only knew each other one or two dates or something like that. Now she's pregnant and what is he gonna do? So they show him going up to the door, bing bong, and he gets on his knee and he's asking her to marry him. She opens the door and she's chewing on a carrot and she's like, what? No, I had an abortion this morning, slam. like, and there was a part of me that was like. Yeah, like she was fine, there wasn't this whole thing. She made the decision. I just thought that's nice representation. I really appreciated that little tiny piece of that, to put that in there. And I hope that it can become more like that over time.

Host: Yeah, fantastic. I think that might be a really good place to start thinking about wrapping up our chat. I guess I would just say, what if you could leave listeners with one thing, one action they should take or one thing you would like to see change, what would that be?

Dr Hall: Look at the history of voting with reproductive health issues with the candidates you're considering voting for. We don't want to be in a situation like they are in the States, oh but money, oh but all these other things and meanwhile at the back door these people are going to be stripping your reproductive rights. So just please look at those issues when you're making your decision around voting and when you look at some of the history of our current conservative leaders voting history, it's not good. It doesn't make me feel safe at all as an abortion provider. And please don't be neutral. Please consider getting out there and voting and making sure that your voice is heard, particularly when it comes to how you feel about autonomy of your body and what happens to it and who has a say in what happens to it.

Host: Incredible that was so beautifully put and it's so important.

Dr Hall: I just keep hearing that from the states they have all these other... ‘Yeah, I don't know whether I should choose between Kamala and Donald?’. And I'm like,’ Okay, do you want like peanut butter and jelly or like razor blades in your mouth’? I don't understand the choice here, but ours is much more subtle. So we have to be vigilant and we do have to do a little work to dig in to see all this history of voting that you're like, wait a minute, you don't stand for abortion.

Host: Yes, that's amazing, amazing metaphor.

Dr Hall: I don't understand those guys.

Host: I know you might not like peanut butter and jelly, but you definitely aren't going to like razor blades in your mouth. Well, thank you so much for chatting today. I hope you will please keep us posted. Let us know about the development with your vision for the Centre and how we can support and get the word out. Just want to thank you so much for sharing your time today and your insight and your humour. We love that. For listeners, we hope this conversation has given you some valuable insights and want to thank you for listening. And we want you to remember abortion is healthcare and in Canada, it's your right. Thank you and bye bye for now.

Outro: Thanks for listening to Choice Chat, a Humanist Canada podcast about choice, dignity and reproductive justice. If you have an abortion story you'd like to share, in your own voice or anonymously, we welcome you to reach out. Do you have a topic you'd like us to explore? Email us at choicechat@humanistcanada.ca or connect with us on social media. 

We believe that by speaking truthfully and listening with care, we help shift the conversation. Because Abortion is Healthcare. Language Matters. Silence Serves No One. Talking about it is how we change everything, and we're grateful you've joined us. Keep the conversation going with your friends, your family, and your community. 

Say the words. Share the truth and break the silence.