"We are failing to act on the information we already have": Family planning, abortion, and the Lalonde Report, 1969-1977.

Decades after its publication, the Lalonde Report is lauded for galvanizing the concept of health promotion. Feminist scholars have faulted the report's androcentrism. However, the report's lack of support for family planning should also be studied by drawing upon the work of historian Larry Collins on abortion, examining the larger backdrop of feminist second-wave dissatisfaction with the 1969 Criminal Code reforms to contraception and abortion, and considering the findings of two significant contemporaneous reports commissioned by the federal government-the Report of the Royal Commission on the Status of Women (1970) and the Report of the Committee on the Operation of the Abortion Law (1977). This exercise underscores that both Marc Lalonde and the federal government fell far short of addressing the family planning needs of Canadian women because of the government's desire to contain the fallout of its reforms to abortion.