Land of the flee

In 1995, Dr. Jen Gunter arrived in Kansas.

The Winnipeg-born-and-raised gynecologist was fresh out of her OB/GYN training at the University of Western Ontario, having completed medical school at the University of Manitoba, and landing in the Midwest was like a reverse Wizard of Oz.

“I was fully unprepared for the culture shock of moving to the United States,” says Gunter, now 58, over the phone from her home in San Francisco. “I thought it would be a lot more like Canada, more open and like ‘Hey, live and let live.’

Gunter was unprepared for the fact that when she moved to Kansas, she would be one of only a handful of doctors who were performing abortions.

“No one talked about it, even in OB/GYN departments. It was like, ‘Oh, send them to Jennifer.’ I was stunned that, here I was, this new graduate from a Canadian program, dealing with people who are 20 weeks (pregnant) with ruptured membranes who need an abortion because there isn’t anybody else on the faculty who can do that.

“It feels like things were, from a reproductive rights standpoint, just barely hanging on — and it didn’t take much to undo it.”

Gunter has had a front-row seat to the erosion of those tenuous reproductive rights in America, having built her life and career in the United States. She moved to the Bay Area and established her clinical practice, as well as a whole additional career as “the Internet’s OB/GYN,” battling medical misinformation peddled by “wellness” hucksters, the most famous being Goop, the empire built out of jade yoni eggs by actress Gwyneth Paltrow.

She has authored several books — The Preemie Primer (2010), The Vagina Bible (2019), The Menopause Manifesto (2021) and last year’s Blood: The Science, Medicine and Mythology of Menstruation — and writes the popular Vajenda newsletter on Substack, which is a continuation of her work advocating for women’s health and tackling medical misinformation, particularly around menopause.

But after 30 years in America, Gunter is moving back to Canada.

Returning to her homeland was always her plan, she says, and while it seems as if her timeline has been moved up owing to recent events in the U.S., “I have been preaching to everybody who will listen where we’re headed,” she says. “The temperature has been rising for this if you’re willing to look at the signs.”

The overturn of Roe v. Wade in 2022; more and more states passing ever-restrictive abortion laws or banning them completely; the increasing criminalization of miscarriage (which is common: 10 to 20 per cent of known pregnancies end in loss and that number might be higher, since it can occur before people know they are pregnant) — all big neon signs.

“It feels like things were, from a reproductive rights standpoint, just barely hanging on — and it didn’t take much to undo it.”–Dr. Jen Gunter

“Before decriminalized abortion in Canada, nobody was getting arrested over having a miscarriage, you know what I mean?” she says. “This whole move to penalize people is born from rank misogyny, but this is how you control people. You create fear. And when you create fear and you control people, it’s harder to have political opposition.”

Shortly after U.S. President Donald Trump was re-elected in November, Gunter sat on a panel hosted by ScienceUpFirst, an initiative combating online misinformation, in Calgary. Of course, people asked her about the political climate in the U.S.

“I kept telling them, ‘You are one bad election away from fascism,’” Gunter says. “I don’t think people realize how fragile things are. People have busy lives, they’re stretched thin, they have kids to pick up, and then all of a sudden, they look up and they see that, wait a minute, what’s happened?”

The Trump administration is now dismantling research funding, scrapping grants and cutting tens of thousands of jobs at the Department of Health and Human Services, which affects agencies such as the Centers for Disease Control, National Institutes of Health, and the Food and Drug Administration.

“We’re going to lose everything. Everything. We’ve had a second death from measles reported today (Sunday),” Gunter says, adding that the U.S. is no longer tracking infectious diseases or foodborne illnesses.

“We’re going to see more and more criminalization for miscarriages. Women who are primarily lower income will be disproportionately affected. This is all a way to create a larger class of people who have fewer and fewer resources.

“I think that what we’re looking at is not only the devastating effect on reproductive health, but because women are more vulnerable in society versus men because they earn less, they are more victimized by domestic violence, they’re the ones who end up doing childcare — anything that harms society, women are almost certainly going to be unequally bearing the burden. So it’s kind of like women are going to be punished twice.”

“This whole move to penalize people is born from rank misogyny, but this is how you control people. You create fear. And when you create fear and you control people, it’s harder to have political opposition.”–Dr. Jen Gunter

On March 8, International Women’s Day, Gunter met with former prime minister Justin Trudeau, and was struck by the many advances Canada has made with respect to reproductive health, including the expansion of access to medication abortion.

Gunter says Canada is at an inflection point as the country heads into an election later this month.

“We have this possibility to head in one really amazing direction and continue to be a world leader. Canada is one of the few countries, I believe, that has no abortion law. It’s not illegal, it’s not legal, it’s just a medical procedure.”

She stresses that these gains can be lost and, as evidenced by the situation in the U.S., lost quickly.

“What I want to say to Canadian women is: abortion is the canary in the coal mine. If people are floating private member bills, that means they’ve been thinking about it for decades, that this is a way to get a foothold in,” she says, in reference to Conservative Leader Pierre Pollievre’s track record of supporting anti-choice private members’ bills.

“And you should also think the same about anti-trans speech. These two things really are canaries in the coal mine.”

Gunter hopes she can bring her expertise and experience to Health Canada or work with the government in some capacity when she moves back.

“We have this possibility to head in one really amazing direction and continue to be a world leader. Canada is one of the few countries, I believe, that has no abortion law. It’s not illegal, it’s not legal, it’s just a medical procedure.”–Dr. Jen Gunter

“I want to try to move beyond helping an individual in the office to trying to help all Canadians,” she says.

But while she’s moving back to Canada, she will not be moving back to Winnipeg. She’ll be sticking to the West Coast.

“Honestly, I love Winnipeg. But I’ve lived on the ocean now for almost 20 years and I just need the ocean,” she says. “And also, my husband was like, ‘Happy to move but not going to go somewhere super cold.’”

jen.zoratti@winnipegfreepress.com

Jen Zoratti
Columnist

Jen Zoratti is a columnist and feature writer working in the Arts & Life department, as well as the author of the weekly newsletter NEXT. A National Newspaper Award finalist for arts and entertainment writing, Jen is a graduate of the Creative Communications program at RRC Polytech and was a music writer before joining the Free Press in 2013. Read more about Jen.

Every piece of reporting Jen produces is reviewed by an editing team before it is posted online or published in print – part of the Free Press‘s tradition, since 1872, of producing reliable independent journalism. Read more about Free Press’s history and mandate, and learn how our newsroom operates.