Abortion in Canada is legal throughout pregnancy and is publicly funded as a medical procedure under the combined effects of the federal Canada Health Act and provincial health-care systems. However, access to services and resources varies by region. While some restrictions exist, Canada is one of the few nations with no criminal restrictions on abortion. Abortion is subject to provincial healthcare regulatory rules and guidelines for physicians. No jurisdiction offers abortion on request at 24 weeks and beyond, although there are exceptions for certain medical complications.

Formally banned in 1869, abortion remained illegal in Canadian law for the next 100 years. In 1969, the Criminal Law Amendment Act, 1968–69 legalized therapeutic abortions, as long as a committee of doctors certified that continuing the pregnancy would likely endanger the woman's life or health. In 1988, the Supreme Court of Canada ruled in R. v. Morgentaler that the existing law was unconstitutional, and struck down the 1969 Act. The ruling found that the 1969 abortion law violated a woman's right to "life, liberty and security of the person" guaranteed under Section 7 of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms established in 1982.

In Canada, all surgical abortions are performed by a physician, with nurse practitioners, pharmacists and midwives able to provide medications for non-invasive medical abortions within nine weeks (63 days) of gestation. Canada has had a relatively stable abortion rate since decriminalization; the rate of recorded abortion per 1000 women of childbearing age (15–44) was 10.2 in 1974, rising to 16.4 abortions per thousand women in 1997, and declining to 10.1 abortions per 1000 women in 2020. However, these rates of abortion only reflect the number of abortions reported by abortion clinics and hospitals. They do not account for unreported abortions in these setting or count abortions induced by prescription drugs such as mifepristone and misoprostol taken at home, and so these official rates of abortion undercount the true rate of abortion. Nevertheless, Canada has a low abortion rate overall compared to other countries, with approximately 74,000 abortions reported in 2020. Roughly half of abortions occur among women aged 18 to 29 years and roughly 90% of abortions are performed within the first trimester (12 weeks).

During the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, abortion before the “quickening” (15–20 weeks) was legal in the British North American colonies. However, as the century progressed, the United Kingdom began to pass laws which created criminal offences relating to abortion, such as the Malicious Shooting or Stabbing Act 1803, that made performing or attempting to perform a post quickening abortion a death penalty offence. That was followed in 1837 by the Offences Against the Person Act 1837, that removed the death penalty clause, while making the procurement of any miscarriage unlawful. The British North American provinces followed the British example and began restricting abortion rights. Abortion was prohibited in Canada in 1869, two years after the country's formation. That prohibition was continued in the Criminal Code until 1969. Anyone who procured a miscarriage for a woman was liable to imprisonment for life, while a woman who procured a miscarriage for herself was liable to imprisonment for two years.

As in other countries, illegal abortions were still performed, and some cases charged that this led to the deaths of women. The abortion trial of Emily Stowe (1879) is one early example. Another such case, Azoulay v The Queen, reached the Supreme Court in 1952. In both cases, the alleged abortion provider was ultimately acquitted of responsibility for the woman's death. Abortion rights activist Marilyn Wilson, former executive director of the Canadian Abortion Rights Action League, says, "Illegal abortions were common, but often of poor safety. Several hundred women per year died from botched abortions."

The movement to liberalize Canada's abortion laws began in the 1960s. Former Chief Coroner of Ontario Morton Shulman recalls that in the sixties, abortion could be legally performed only to save the life of the woman, so there were practically no legal abortions. He stated that the pregnant daughters of the rich were sent to reliable physicians who did abortions for cash. He estimated that these physicians did twenty to thirty abortions per week. Women who were not rich were left to perform an abortion on themselves or go to what he called a "nurse" abortionist. Their method was commonly pumping Lysol into the woman's womb. The mortality rate was high and the infection rate was over 50%. He added, "By the time I became Chief Coroner, I had had the unpleasant experience of seeing the bodies of some dozens of young women who had died as a result of these amateur abortions."

Shulman decided to publicize deaths from illegal abortions. He instructed his coroners to call a public inquest into each abortion death. He describes one case that he believes was the turning point, that of 34-year-old Lottie Leanne Clarke, a mother of three children, who died of a massive infection in 1964 after an illegal abortion in spite of medical treatment and antibiotics. At the inquest into her death, the jury recommended that the laws about therapeutic abortion be revised. Shulman added that a federal government committee should review the question of abortion and the law. Newspapers published editorials recommending the reform of the abortion law. In 1965, the Minister of Justice, Guy Favreau, wrote to Shulman that the recommendation would be considered in the program to amend the Criminal Code. The eventual amendment closely followed the recommendations of the coroners' juries.

In 1967, Justice Minister Pierre Trudeau introduced a bill which included an amendment to the provision of the Criminal Code which prohibited abortions. The bill, known as the Criminal Law Amendment Act, 1968–69, continued the basic prohibition on abortions, with the potential life sentence. However, the bill made an exception for abortions performed in a hospital with the approval of that hospital's three-doctor therapeutic abortion committee. The committee would have to certify that the pregnancy would be likely to endanger the life or health of the pregnant woman. The term health was not defined, and therapeutic abortion committees were free to develop their own theories as to when a likely danger to "health" (which might include psychological health) would justify a therapeutic abortion. This same bill also legalized homosexuality and contraception, and would be the subject of one of Trudeau's most famous quotations: "The state has no business in the bedrooms of the nation."