Dr. Henry Morgentaler, Canada’s most heralded and vilified abortion doctor, who was assaulted and imprisoned for defying restrictive laws but who won the landmark Canadian Supreme Court decision that legalized abortion nationally in 1988, died on Tuesday at his home in Toronto. He was 90.

Carolyn Egan, who is with the Ontario Coalition for Abortion Clinics, told The Associated Press that his family had confirmed the death.

In a country known for tolerance and free medical care for all citizens, Dr. Morgentaler was for decades at the center of battles between powerful forces like the Roman Catholic Church, which opposed abortion for any reason short of saving an endangered mother’s life, and women’s groups that contended that the decision not to bear a child is a personal one.

Dr. Morgentaler, who had survived Nazi death camps at Auschwitz and Dachau and emigrated from Poland to Canada after World War II, basically founded the Canadian abortion-rights movement in the late 1960s. He opened abortion clinics across the country, trained hundreds of doctors to perform abortions and said he had performed tens of thousands of them himself.