Province of No Choice

Why doctors are still fighting to provide abortion care in New Brunswick

- JESSICA LEEDER

ADRIAN EDGAR was just eight days old when he arrived in New Brunswick for the very first time — too late to claim being a tenth-generation New Brunswicker by birth but young enough that the Atlantic salt air worked its alchemy, embedding in him a deep sense of belonging. Of course, Edgar, now in his late thirties, can’t remember that first visit, but it launched a rhythm that shaped his life: summer vacations were spent floating on the waves off New Brunswick’s coast, and through the other seasons, there was the countdown to his return.

The year he was fifteen, Edgar spent time at the public library near his home, in London, Ontario, doing research. “This was before the internet. Long before Facebook or Twitter or Grindr . . . . If you wanted to know if you’d like kissing someone of the same gender, you couldn’t google it,” he said a couple of years ago in his speech as grand marshal of Fierté Fredericton Pride. “If we had a question like that, we went to the library and looked it up in physical books.” Sitting at a long wooden table, reading Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman (thought to be among the first poets in North America to describe homosexual love), Edgar began to realize he was queer — and the implications of that. “The status quo then was terrifying. Gay marriage wasn’t legal. Too many gay men and trans women were dying of aids or random acts of violence or suicide,” Edgar continued. “The status quo then was a world that didn’t seem to want me in it. I had to choose to accept that or to resist.”