Gomperts in 2017

Rebecca Gomperts (born 1966) is a Dutch physician and activist for women's rights, in particular abortion rights. She is the founder of Women on Waves and Women on Web, which provide reproductive health services for women in countries where they are not available. In 2013 and 2014, Gomperts was included in the BBC's 100 Women.[1][2] In 2018, she founded Aid Access, which operates in the United States.[3] A trained abortion specialist and activist, she is generally considered the first abortion rights activist to cross international borders.[4]

Gomperts was included in Time's 100 Most Influential People in 2020.[5]

Early life

Rebecca Gomperts was born in 1966 in Paramaribo in Suriname.[6] Her family moved to the Netherlands when she was three years old and she grew up in the harbor town of Vlissingen.[7] Although she grew up in a small town, an international consciousness was instilled in her that would drive her future career.[7]

Gomperts moved to Amsterdam in the mid-1980s after high school.[4] Having an interest for both the arts and sciences, she studied visual arts and medicine. She studied conceptual art and completed a four-year art degree at Amsterdam's Rietveld Academy, attending medical school at the same time.[8]

Career

Early career

After graduating from medical school, Gompert worked in a small hospital in Guiana as a trainee doctor.[7] While working in Guiana, she witnessed the realities of illegal abortions for the first time.[9] As of 1997, she was a 31-year-old doctor based in Amsterdam who performed legal abortions.[4]

Between 1997 and 1998, Gomperts sailed with a Greenpeace ship called the Rainbow Warrior II as a resident physician and environmental activist.[4] She sailed through Latin America, visiting Romania and Guinea.[4]

Women on Waves

Women on Waves logo

After her travels with Greenpeace, Gomperts's interest in reproductive health increased. Gomperts wanted the health damages and death rates from botched at-home abortions to decline, so she designed a program founded upon the radical idea that women could do safe abortions and get medical abortions performed in places where abortion clinics are highly restricted or do not exist at all.[10]

Gomperts used contacts she had made during art school to help her design and fund a mobile clinic.[10] A close friend of hers, Joep van Lieshout, agreed to help design the clinic.[10] The clinic was called A-Portable.[11] Gomperts and van Lieshout put a feminist spin on Gomperts' original inspiration of the activism on the Rainbow Warrior II.[12] Gomperts applied for funds from the Dutch National Arts Council to obtain the $500,000 necessary for medical equipment and $190,000 of seed capital.[12] The grant for the mobile clinic came from the Mondriaan Foundation.[8] Gomperts's background in art helped her execute this vision.[8] The A-Portable was labelled a functional work of art. This meant that whenever a transport ministry tried to confiscate the container on national waters, the certification of the A-Portable as a sculpture made its border crossing legal.[10]

Gompets formed the organization Women on Waves in 1999 after she returned from her voyage on the Rainbow Warrior II. Women on Waves brought non-surgical abortion services and education to countries around the world that did not offer them.[13] Using the grant from the Mondriaan Foundation, Women on Waves rented a boat on which the mobile clinic would be held. Many media outlets were shocked that Gomperts was not at all concerned with her ship being detained, impounded, or sunk when entering a nations' waters.[12]

Women on Waves made many voyages. News spread quickly that Gomperts was trying to reach countries where abortion was illegal, and many nations took measures to stop her.[4] Women on Waves traveled to Ireland, Poland, Portugal, Spain, Morocco, and Guatemala.[7] Although the first eleven-day trip to Dublin was deemed unsuccessful by the media, Women On Waves had received more than 200 abortion requests from women ashore who needed their help.[4] Women on Waves intended to help create legal precedent in the grey areas of nations' abortion laws, to reach women who had been refused abortions by their own physicians, and to prevent the dangers of unsafe abortion procedures.[4]

Women on Waves faced many challenges during its voyages.[14] On one of Gomperts's trips to Portugal, her mobile clinic was not allowed to dock. Gomperts appeared on a Portuguese talk show instead.[10] She talked about how women could perform safe abortions by themselves at home and how they could obtain and take abortion pills.[10] Gomperts realized that she could reach more people through the internet than she could in a boat.[10] "In the end our ship will never be a structural solution for the enormous number of women who need abortions",[4] said Gomperts.

Art exhibitions

After Women on Waves gained some international recognition, it began to participate in art exhibitions around the world.[13] The A-Portable was exhibited in the 49th Venice Biennale in 2001.[11] It was presented on a raft, floating just out in the waters at the Arsenale.[8]

There were four other exhibitions in 2001 where Gomperts collaborated with Willem Velthoven.[13] These four installations, Portrait Collector, Sea, I Had An Abortion and Every 6 Minutes, were presented in the Mediamatic Women on Waves show.[13] Portrait Collector was a collection of internet kiosks where viewers who had had abortions could photograph themselves and become part of the exhibition.[13] Gomperts was trying to show how often abortions occur.[13] Sea was an interactive narrative composed of shots of the sea taken on Women on Waves' first exhibition to Ireland.[13] Its audio component was a poetic work of voices of women asking Women on Waves for help.[13] I Had An Abortion featured wire coat hangers with vests hung on them. Each vest had "I Had An Abortion" written on it in all European languages.[13] The final installation, Every 6 Minutes, had a very simple message. Every six minutes a red lamp flashed, symbolizing the statistic thata woman dies from an unsafe abortion every six minutes.[13]

On July 12, 2003, the Mediamatic Supermarkt entrance was blocked with the A-Portable.[13] This interactive exhibition presented by Mediamatic was the final installation of their Women On Waves exhibition. It allowed viewers to walk into the portable container that was transformed into an abortion clinic and sailed across international waters.[13]

Women on Web

In 2005, Gomperts' second organization, Women on Web, was founded. As of 2016, Women on Web was receiving more than 10,000 emails a month from more than 123 countries.[7] Women asked for advice on abortion pills, contraceptives, and relationships. Instead of delivering abortion pills from the sea, Women on Web uses packages and drones to send pills and instructions for safe, at-home abortions.[7]

Women on Web launched an ad campaign that utilized barcodes hidden in plain sight within images.[11] If scanned, the barcodes provided viewers with information on the abortion pill[11]

Aid Access

In 2018, Gomperts founded Aid Access, which operates in the United States.[4] Aid Access has shipped mifepristone and misoprostol from a pharmacy in India to "tens of thousands of people in the USA",[15] who complete online forms, exclude contraindications, and report a gestation of 10 weeks or less.[16]

Vessel, a documentary about Women on Waves, premiered in 2014 at the Southwest Film Festival.[17] This documentary depicts the creation of a network of reproductive health activists led by Gomperts.[17]

Personal life

Gompert has two children and lives in Amsterdam.[6]

References

  1. ↑ "100 Women: Who took part?". BBC. 22 November 2013.
  2. ↑ "Who are the 100 Women 2014?". BBC. 26 October 2014.
  3. ↑ Koerth, Maggie (1 November 2022). "As States Banned Abortion, Thousands More Americans Got Pills Online Anyway". FiveThirtyEight. Retrieved 6 November 2022.
  4. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 Corbett, Sara (26 August 2001). "The Pro-Choice Extremist". The New York Times Magazine.
  5. ↑ Richards, Cecile (22 September 2020). "Rebecca Gomperts: The 100 Most Influential People of 2020". Time.
  6. 1 2 Ferry, Julie (14 November 2007). "Abortion on the high seas". the Guardian. Retrieved 19 November 2018.
  7. 1 2 3 4 5 6 Oppenheim, Maya (31 May 2016). "Meet the woman travelling the world delivering abortion drugs by drone". The Independent.
  8. 1 2 3 4 Lambert‐Beatty, Carrie (1 January 2008). "Twelve Miles: Boundaries of the New Art/Activism". Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society. 33 (2): 309–327. doi:10.1086/521179. ISSN 0097-9740. S2CID 147307705.
  9. ↑ "The doctor who brought abortion out of the shadows in Ireland". POLITICO. 20 March 2018. Retrieved 19 November 2018.
  10. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 Bazelon, Emily (28 August 2014). "The Dawn of the Post-Clinic Abortion". The New York Times Magazine.
  11. 1 2 3 4 Timeto, Federica (9 March 2016). Diffractive Technospaces. Routledge. doi:10.4324/9781315577111. ISBN 9781315577111.
  12. 1 2 3 Weinkopf, Chris (Winter 2001). "The Abortion Boat" (PDF). Human Life Review. 27 (1): 23–30.
  13. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 "Women on Waves -Mediamatic Exhibition 6". Mediamatic. 1 January 2003. 13 July 2003–24 August 2003
  14. ↑ "Mexico: Abortion on the High Seas | #TheOutlawOcean". YouTube. 1 April 2019.
  15. ↑ Conaboy, Chelsea, The Doctor Prescribing Abortions from Overseas, Politico, June 3, 2022
  16. ↑ Rubin, Rita; Abbasi, Jennifer; Suran, Melissa (18 May 2022). "How Caring for Patients Could Change in a Post– Roe v Wade US". JAMA. 327 (21): 2060–2062. doi:10.1001/jama.2022.8526. ISSN 0098-7484. PMID 35583902. S2CID 248858571.
  17. 1 2 "Vessel - Home page". Vessel - the Film. Retrieved 12 December 2021.
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