Women on Waves: Challenging abortion laws around the world.

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THERE IS A SHIP THAT SAILS THROUGH LOOPHOLES IN INTERNATIONAL LAW...Vessel


TEDxAmazônia - Diana Whitten sobre aborto e hipocrisia - Nov.2010

Women on Waves

Women on Waves: The Abortion Rights Movement Sets Sail

Approximately 25% of the world’s population lives in countries with very restrictive abortion laws. The majority of these countries are located in Latin America, Africa, and Asia. In Chile, for example, an illegal abortion is a criminal offense punishable by jail time. These anti-abortion laws are rooted in Pope Pius IX’s decree in 1869 that ensoulement occurs at conception. Thus, laws in the 19th century prohibited the termination of pregnancy. These laws from two centuries ago form the basis of the legislation against abortion that still exists in numerous developing countries today. While many developed countries relaxed their abortion laws in the 50s, 60s, 70s, and 80s with the rise of human rights movements, the countries in which abortion is still illegal retained their colonial era laws.

Rebecca Gomperts founded Women on Waves in 1999 to ease the suffering of women in these countries who had no means of obtaining abortion services. She developed a mobile abortion clinic that can be easily transported onto a ship. Aboard the ship, WoW also provides contraceptives, information, training, and workshops in addition to safe and legal abortions. When the ship is in international waters, at least 12 miles off the coast, the local anti-abortion laws do not apply. Gomperts’s strategy is to stir up controversy with her visit and to ignite debate that may eventually lead to a reversal in the legislation against abortion.

In October of 2008, Gomperts and her onboard doctors sailed to Spain to provide medical abortions using a cocktail of two drugs—mifepristone and misoprostol. Mifepristone terminates the pregnancy and misoprostol helps expel the unborn fetus. Spain’s pro-life approach to abortion stems from its deeply rooted history of Catholicism, which holds abortion to be a grave evil. It wasn’t until 1985 that abortions in cases of rape, deformity of the fetus, or mental unfitness of the woman were decriminalized in Spain. Gomperts teamed up with 33 different Spanish activist groups to create a hotline for women seeking abortion and transported the women 17 miles off the coast of Spain. Her efforts garnered the media’s attention and ignited the push to liberalize Spain’s abortion laws. In 2009, the Socialist government began working on a law that would allow abortion for pregnancies through the fourteenth week. The law won final approval on February 24, 2010 and took effect on July 5, 2010.
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if anyone's interested, i subtitled the video for this talk with universal subtitles a couple of months ago: http://www.universalsubtitles.org/en-gb/videos/RETLIZ2PucId/