50 ans de construction des administrations publiques Sous la direction de Nelson Michaud, Montréal : Presses de l'Université du Québec, 2016, pp.186

Abstract

participate in safeguarding women's constitutional rights" (52). Johnstone is careful to stress that without formal recognition of a positive right to abortion by the federal government, access to abortion care will always remain vulnerable. This book updates an aging literature on abortion politics in Canada. Both its structure and writing style are clear and engaging, and After Morgentaler will no doubt be instructive for scholars and students interested in abortion politics and in Canadian politics more generally. Additionally, it might be informative to those interested in larger questions involving health care, judicial politics, the strategic mobilization of social movements and questions of the federal division of power in Canada. Given that abortion politics are ever changing and that abortion remains an essentially contested issue, After Morgentaler, in some respects, raises as many questions as it answers. For example, innovative reproductive technologies, such as increasingly sophisticated ultrasounds, are sure to change the parameters and contours of both state and non-state approaches to the abortion issue, something largely absent from Johnstone's account. In particular, within the post-Morgentaler context, there has emerged an increasingly pertinent discussion surrounding the self-management of abortion, especially given the relatively recently approved "abortion pill" (mifepristone) in 2015. Thirty years later after Morgentaler, then, and with a plethora of new media and pharmaceutical technologies at our disposal, how do we reassess what women need from abortion legislation, technology, care, access and reproductive justice, while respecting the specific conditions within which abortion is sought? And perhaps more importantly, how might these new conversations transform the ways that abortion politics and provision are negotiated in Canada in the future? While providing a detailed and compelling account of the developments shaping abortion politics in Canada before and after Morgentaler, Johnstone's book raises important questions about where the abortion debate is headed over the next 30 years.