women on waves

When reproductive rights are restricted on solid land, there’s a solution: hit the high seas.

In the late 1990s, Rebecca Gomperts, a Dutch physician, was an activist and doctor aboard the Rainbow Warrior – a Greenpeace ship that conducts environmental campaigns and blockades on the high seas. "I was sailing with Greenpeace to countries where abortion is illegal, like Mexico and Guatemala,” she explains. “And I heard so much suffering from all the women I talked to, because they couldn’t access the service."

Trained as an abortion provider, Rebecca and a handful of other activists decided to put two and two together: why not use a ship to bring termination services to women in the estimated 25 per cent of countries where they’re still forbidden?

Thus, Women on Waves – also known as ‘the Abortion Ship’ – was born in 1999. It's an ingenious project that relies on a combination of technology, innovation, legal know-how and sheer determination to deliver reproductive justice to women who would otherwise have no options. Dutch artist Atelier van Lieshout designed a portable abortion clinic inside a retrofitted shipping container, which can be strapped to boats registered in the Netherlands. Once women are aboard, the ship is sailed 20 kilometres off the coast into international waters, where medical abortions are provided under Dutch law, rather than those of the local country.

But it isn't always that easy. The ship is a big 'up yours' to states that restrict abortion, and that’s often how it's treated. In almost 20 years of conducting campaigns with Women on Waves, Rebecca has discovered the extreme lengths some countries will go to to stop women from boarding the ship.

"In Portugal in 2004, we couldn’t even enter the country, because warships stopped the boat," she says. "The Minister of Defence was an extremely right-wing Catholic – he acted on his own, and the President was not amused at all. It was a huge debate in the European parliament, because it was unprecedented that a ship from another European nation was stopped by the navy, and not allowed to enter the country."

Similar obstacles have prevented the ship from docking in Morocco and Guatemala, showing how intertwined abortion is with other aspects of the countries' ruling powers. This is the bleeding edge of feminist activism, where women's rights are suppressed with naked displays of military force.

"Abortion is not necessarily only about women’s rights. It’s really about fundamental freedoms, and women’s bodies are a tool," Rebecca says. "What I always say is that in countries that lack a rule of law – that are authoritarian or even dictatorships – the first thing that goes is women’s rights and abortion rights. So, the ship is actually a test for different countries: what is the situation of the rule of law and democracy?"

It's also a test of medical technology. "Initially we set up the clinic to do surgical abortions on the boat, but immediately after the first campaign it was clear that was not going to work," she says. Surgical abortions, which involve an operation to physically remove the contents of someone's uterus, are complex and medically demanding. They require special instruments and a very clean, sterile environment. All of this is usually done in a purpose-built clinic, a very difficult thing to replicate in an old shipping container.

Rebecca’s solution to this problem? Pills – mifepristone and misoprostol – which, when taken together, are more than 95 per cent effective during the first 50 days of pregnancy. Misoprostol can also be used alone, and is more than 94 per cent effective if

administered correctly. "When I started Women on Waves, the abortion pill was only just registered in the Netherlands, and I had no idea of its potential at that moment,” Rebecca explains. “It was by doing the work that I realised how important the pills were. It’s really revolutionary! Before they existed, women were dependent on people who knew their anatomy to have a safe abortion – doctors, nurses or midwives."

Rebecca has been a pioneer in the distribution of abortion pills, which have caused a huge shift in the power relationship between women and the medical establishment that often seeks to control their bodies. "You don’t need to be a doctor to provide information on how they work – anyone can do that. It can be the internet, it can be women’s groups, it can be a friend. But that information needs to be disseminated," she says.

Realising this, Rebecca started another organisation in 2005, Women on Web, which mails abortion pills to ladies around the globe. It's the same practical, innovative spirit that led her to found Women on Waves, but it provides women with even more autonomy to decide their own fate. "We started training local women’s rights organisations, helping them set up safe abortion hotlines so that people could access this information," she says. "And it changed the whole landscape. It was very empowering for women’s rights groups, because before they were limited to protesting for changes to the law, whereas this really helps women in a very concrete way. There are now safe abortion hotlines all over Latin America." Since its launch, Women on Web has helped more than 50,000 ladies perform medical abortions at home. The organisation receives 10,000 emails per month in 17 languages. They recently began mailing pills to the USA, where more than 600 women have now accessed the service. Medical abortion pills were also a key issue in the recent Irish referendum, where 66 per cent of voters came out in favour of legalising abortion.

"We have been extremely active in Ireland over the last couple of years,” Rebecca says. “We published a lot of research on how many women are using the abortion pill in Ireland, and their experiences with it. So suddenly there was this debate about it. We had abortion drones, and abortion robots, and abortion buses, and abortion trains, and there was an enormous, intense campaign with them. Women are not really travelling to the UK anymore – actually, they are having illegal abortions on Irish soil, and that changed the whole dynamic."

The picture Rebecca paints is both appalling and optimistic. While abortion remains heavily restricted, her activism proves that there’s always a way around the opposition, even when the situation has been hopeless for many years. It also shows the increasing futility of countries using their legal systems to control abortion access, given the rise of new channels for feminist activism, such as ocean shipping routes, drones that fly pills over borders, or simply accessing the internet.

But Rebecca is certain that abortion law reform is still critical, and there’s more ground to shift, even in places with progressive legal systems. "Initially, I thought as long as women have access to the pills, it’s fine,” she says. “But I changed my mind. We have to fight for legalisation of abortion as well, because many women are not literate, and many women cannot access the internet. There’s more work to do in countries where it’s legal, like the Netherlands, Australia and the UK, to make sure it becomes really widely available and free. If women have to pay for an abortion, many will not be able to afford it. In order to create social justice, abortions have to be free and available around the corner."