Activists on both sides of the abortion debate – with their bombastic rhetoric and protest rally kitsch (coathangers on one side, teeny fetus feet buttons on the other) – are masters of agit prop theatrics. It’s an issue that readily lends itself to operatic grandstanding, and Canada’s pro-choice movement has enjoyed no less a diva than the indomitable Henry Morgentaler.

In Morgentaler, Toronto Star feature writer Catherine Dunphy paints the cheerfully self-described “abortionist” as a delightfully flawed hero: a warrior, an egotist, a philanderer, and a flake. Since he began performing abortions in Montreal in the late 1960s, Morgentaler has endured a 10-month prison sentence, endless legal wranglings, threats and hate mail, a bombing – and has established 16 successful free-standing abortion clinics in Canada.

Exhaustively researched and documented, the book occasionally gets mired in the legal particulars. As a journalist, Dunphy is keen on getting in all the facts. This makes reading a slog at times and serves accuracy but doesn’t add much to our understanding of Morgentaler. Dunphy manages to keep it lively by offering juicy, personal details. Still, Morgentaler is as much a comprehensive guide to the pro-choice struggle as a biography of the man himself. But then, as Dunphy astutely points out, Morgentaler is his cause. Driven by his inner demons as much as his humanist beliefs, Morgentaler uses every challenge, every victory, every face-off with authority to avenge the Holocaust murders of his socialist-hero parents and sister.

Dunphy doesn’t push that hard or pry that deep – she doesn’t need to, though. Morgentaler wears his psyche on his sleeve. And his paradoxes are manifest. He’s an Auschwitz survivor who is repeatedly compared to Hitler by his enemies. He’s a secular Jew who searches for truth through primal scream therapy, Club Med retreats, and the teachings of the sex-and-Saran-Wrap swami, Baghwan Shree Rajneesh. He’s a huge ego in feminism’s communal political milieu. And he’s a champion of women and a flirt with an inability to keep it in his pants.

Happily, Dunphy never glosses over Morgentaler’s foibles – making the hero all the more maddeningly charming by revealing his humanity.