When Abortion Is Illegal In Your Country, This Activist Group Can Sail to You to Provide the Procedu

http://www.alternet.org/activism/when-abortion-illegal-your-country-activist-group-can-sail-you-provide-procedure

30, 2014  |    
A woman in Morocco looking for help is considering drinking bleach to end her pregnancy. In Poland, a rape victim says she’s thinking about hitting her stomach with a stick to induce a miscarriage. Another woman desperately emails, “I am not a monster, I just cannot have the baby.”

These are the distressed messages that  Women on Waves receive every day from women who live in countries where abortion is illegal. The organisation, an activist group famous for providing abortions on a ship in international waters, has recently been chronicled in the award-winning film,  Vessel. The movie follows the work of Dutch doctor Rebecca Gomperts and her crew as they work around various countries’ abortion laws – and sometimes just flout them – to help women end their pregnancies.

While watching the film, which  has its New York premiere next month, it’s hard not think about the current hostile climate for reproductive rights here in the US and wonder: How long until illegal abortion is the norm here, too?

Diana Whitten, the film’s director and producer who spoke with me by phone from a screening in Vermont, told me that, while it’s not in anyone’s best interest to break the law, “laws never prevent abortion.”

“They never have, and they never will. All they prevent is  safe abortion,” she said.  Women on Waves, she added, will never bring “abortion to these countries - it’s already there.” It’s just illegal.