Henry Morgentaler, Abortion Doctor in Canada, Dies at 90 John Lehmann/Associated Press Dr. Henry Morgentaler, a household name in Canada, in 1998. Dr. Henry Morgentaler, Canada's most heralded and vilified abortion doctor, who was assaulted and imprisoned for defying restrictive laws but who won the landmark Canadian Supreme Court decision that legalized abortion nationally in 1988, died on Tuesday at his home in Toronto. He was 90. Carolyn Egan, who is with the Ontario Coalition for Abortion Clinics, told The Associated Press that his family had confirmed the death. In a country known for tolerance and free medical care for all citizens, Dr. Morgentaler was for decades at the center of battles between powerful forces like the Roman Catholic Church, which opposed abortion for any reason short of saving an endangered mother's life, and women's groups that contended that the decision not to bear a child is a personal one. Dr. Morgentaler, who had survived Nazi death camps at Auschwitz and Dachau and emigrated from Poland to Canada after World War II, basically founded the Canadian abortion-rights movement in the late 1960s. He opened abortion clinics across the country, trained hundreds of doctors to perform abortions and said he had performed tens of thousands of them himself. Dr. Morgentaler was threatened with death, attacked with garden shears, roughed up by a mob, caricatured as a baby butcher, splashed with ketchup and accused of fomenting violence. He escaped injury when one clinic was firebombed. After several abortion doctors were shot, he wore bulletproof vests and installed bulletproof windows at home. He became a household name in Canada, featured in books, articles and films, including a 1984 documentary directed by Paul Cowan, "Democracy on Trial: The Morgentaler Affair." From Dr. Morgentaler's perspective, anti-abortion laws violated a woman's right to control her body and imposed untold suffering on unwanted children to assuage the sensibilities of religious moralists, and he refused to shut up or be discreet.In her biography "Morgentaler: A Difficult Hero" (1996), Catherine Dunphy wrote that Dr. Morgentaler performed an illegal abortion for the first time on Jan. 9, 1968. The patient was the 18-year-old daughter of a friend. "I decided to break the law to provide a necessary medical service because women were dying at the hands of butchers and incompetent quacks, and there was no one there to help them," Ms. Dunphy quoted him as saying. The law was barbarous, cruel and unjust. I had been in a concentration camp, and I knew what suffering was. If I can ease suffering, I feel perfectly justified in doing so. His clinics were picketed by protesters and raided by the police. He was arrested four times for performing illegal abortions and acquitted each time by jurors, who accepted his defense that the operations had been necessary for the patients" mental or physical health. At the time, Canadian prosecutors could appeal jury verdicts - a practice later discontinued - and one of his early acquittals was reversed in Quebec. He was sentenced to 18 months in prison but released in 10 months after he had a heart attack. Another acquittal was overturned in Ontario, and his appeal went to Canada's Supreme Court. The appeal challenged the constitutionality of Canada's federal abortion law, which allowed hospital abortions only if a committee of three doctors had concluded that a continued pregnancy would endanger the mother. On Jan. 28, 1988, the court struck down the law, ruling that it denied women the right of "life, liberty and security of the person" as guaranteed in Canada's Charter of Rights and Freedoms. "Forcing a woman by threat of criminal sanctions to carry a fetus to term unless she meets certain criteria unrelated to her own priorities and aspirations is a profound interference with a woman's body and thus an infringement of security of the person," Chief Justice Brian Dickson wrote in a 5-to-2 ruling that threw out Dr. Morgentaler's conviction. While specific issues were different, the Canadian ruling, like the United States Supreme Court's in Roe v. Wade in 1973, recognized a woman's right to make her own childbearing decisions. But in Canada's 10 provinces, laws and customs varied, and for years after winning his landmark case Dr. Morgentaler challenged provincial restrictions and payment practices. He looked like an aging hippie: gray-bearded and balding, ascetic eyes behind horn-rimmed glasses, a gentle smile and delicate hands. His extraordinary thinness was a lifelong reminder of the near starvation he experienced in a Polish ghetto and the concentration camps.