Who Is Dr. Henry Morgentaler?

Toronto, ON - In a lead-up to CTV's January 5th airing of the movie "Choice: The Henry Morgentaler Story" a new Ipsos-Reid/CTV survey shows that three-quarters of the young women in Canada (73%) have either never heard of Dr. Morgentaler or can't identify him as perhaps the best know abortion activist physician in Canada.

The survey, which was conducted among adult Canadian women aged 18-34, asked two separate questions about Dr. Morgentaler.

The first question asked whether or not they had ever heard of a Dr. Morgentaler - to which 38% of young women said "yes" and 62% said "no". In follow-up, those women that had heard of a Dr. Morgentaler (38%) were asked if they knew who he was - 75% of these respondents correctly identified him as either an abortion doctor (71%), an abortion rights leader (3%), or as someone who set up abortion clinics (1%). However, 21% of this 38% indicated that they didn't know who he is, another 3% thought he was someone who performs euthanasia, and a further 3% thought he was some "other" individual.

When the results of these two questions are combined and deduced it appears that only 28% of young women have both heard of Dr. Morgentaler and can correctly identify him as an abortion doctor or activist, compared to 73% who have either not heard of him or can't accurately indicate his professional identity.

These are the findings of an Ipsos-Reid/ CTV poll conducted from November 12th to November 22nd 2004. For the survey, a representative randomly selected sample of 461 Canadians women aged 18-34 were interviewed by telephone. With a sample of this size, the results are considered accurate to within 177 4.6 percentage points, 19 times out of 20, of what they would have been had this entire population been polled. These data were weighted to ensure the sample's regional and age composition reflects this population according to the 2001 Census data.