Gomperts is the head of a program called Women on Waves, which operates the Aurora under provisions in Dutch law (and a waiver from the Dutch Minister of Health) that allow doctors, like Gomperts, to distribute abortion pills. Recent changes to Dutch law restrict women's access to medical abortions to specialized clinics, meaning that Gomperts and her patients could be prosecuted, according to The Independent.

Previously, Dutch women could obtain abortion pills from their doctor and bring on a miscarriage at home in the first two weeks of pregnancy. This is also legally possible in France and several other EU countries. But under a law passed by the Dutch coalition government in May, the prescription and use of abortion pills has been limited to approved clinics.

"The change in the Dutch law means that women in other countries would no longer be protected and could be prosecuted if they came to our ship," Dr Gomperts said yesterday. "We do not want to take that risk. We have suspended the voyages that we planned this year off the coasts of Nicaragua, Chile, Brazil and Argentina."

In Nicaragua this is particularly problematic, as a recent Amnesty International study shows that women and doctors are actively being prosecuted for abortions and even medical treatments intended to save the lives of mothers.

Interestingly, though, Gomperts uses the opportunity to debunk the biggest myth of her abortion ship: she's never performed a single surgical abortion on it. She tells the NRC Handelsblad:

Gomperts' dream of a fleet of abortion boats never materialised. It took until October 2008 for the organisation to get permission to use a converted sea container to perform curettages under certain conditions (up to 12 weeks pregnancy). Boats were used for campaign purposes, but no abortions were ever carried out there.

"The abortion boat is a myth," says Gomperts. "There are people who think we provide practical help all over the world. Of course it's a pretty sight: a ship entering a harbour full of women saying: abortion is a right. And then there will always be people wanting to stop the boat. The result is a symbolic fight that speaks to the imagination."

Reality is more prosaic. "Our only real strategy is letting women know that there is such a thing as the abortion pill. They have to know that there is medication available for pregnancy termination."

Gomperts tells The Independent that they did, however, distribute the pills to trigger a medical abortion on the ship, for the women brave enough to cross barriers and even picket lines to reach them.

Gomperts, however, hasn't simply given up. She's involved with a new organization called Women on Web, which operates in Canada and under Canadian law and uses online interviews to prescribe the abortion pill to women all over the world who otherwise lack access to it. She tells The Independent:

Dr Gomperts is also involved in another organisation, the Canadian-registered Women on Web, which makes abortion pills available by mail – sometimes for free – to women in countries where it is illegal. A doctor asks 25 questions over the internet to check for counter-indications. The pills are then sent in a plain envelope.

"For many women this is huge progress," Dr Gomperts said. "Women in countries where abortion is illegal live under tremendous stress. They go to unreliable websites where they are offered fake pills. There is also a [Women on Web] help desk where women can talk about their worries. There are no taboos online; there is no shame to talk."

Online counterfeiting of pharmaceuticals — especially from companies pretending to be in Canada — is a big problem, as some (one could even say most) often don't contain the advertised active ingredients. Both of Gomperts' sites warn women about the problems with buying counterfeit pills.

Having been a pro-choice activist for more than a decade, Gomperts doesn't plan to allow changes to Dutch law — or a threatened legal investigation — to force her to stop her work. She's taking legal action over the new law, and devoting more time to Women on Web in order to see that women the world over have safe access to the medical procedure they will, regardless of its legality, continue to seek.

'Abortion Ship' Sails Into Christian Storm [The Independent]
Dutch Abortion Boat To Sail No More [NRC Handelsblad via Feministe]

Related: Nicaragua Abortion Ban 'Cruel And Inhuman Disgrace' [CNN]
Women on Waves
Women on Web

[Image via Willem Velthoven]

1. Planned Parenthood: "Heartless" The Planned Parenthood spot is much more scripted, interspersing shots of a rape survivor telling her story with voiceovers about the Wasilla policies and pictures of McCain's and Palin's floating, disembodied heads. At the end, the woman says "It scares me to death" to think that a hospital might have charged her for a rape kit. My first thought was: you were raped and that's what scares you to death? Really? It's not a good thing, goodness knows, to be charged for one's rape kit and I'm not saying that it didn't cross my mind that I didn't really want to be calling my insurance company to be pre-approved for an ER visit, but "scares me to death"? It's that kind of hyperbole that makes the ad easily dismissed.


2. Women Against McCain Palin: "Choice?" This WAMP ad shows a young woman barely holding back tears as she explains that she was raped and got pregnant — and that Sarah Palin wants the government to be able to force her to carry the pregnancy to term. It's not flashy, it doesn't feature floating heads or voice overs, and it isn't remotely hyperbolic. It's a far better ad because it doesn't appear to be using a woman's somewhat unrelated story to make a policy point — the woman in the Planned Parenthood ad didn't have to pay for her rape kit, so it's a tenuous connection to the policy Planned Parenthood and many of us object to.


3. Women Against McCain Palin: "Family Values" This ad, featuring the mother of an underage rape victim, is also strongly worded, though not quite as powerful. It also, notably, makes the point that "Sarah Palin thinks the government knows better than we do," which is the conflict inherent in the Republican party ideology of small government and the religious right's ideology of forcing the government to impose their religious views on the larger society.


Am I more comfortable with the last two ads — which were not, I'd like to stress, made by the Obama campaign — than I was with the rumored, unscripted one I initially wrote about? Sure. I don't think it would have been a good place for the Obama campaign to go, but the WAMP ads came out well without seeming exploitative. Now, if we could just politically get past the idea that there are morally defensible abortions (which implies that there are morally indefensible abortions), I'd like to do that, too. But this, at least, is a start.

Choice? [YouTube]
Family Values [YouTube]
Heartless [YouTube]
"Governor Palin....I Should Have A Choice About This" [DailyKos]
Women Against McCain Palin [SaysMe.tv]

Unruh's journey from hippie to anti-abortion activist began, she says, with her late-seventies abortion of her fourth pregnancy — an abortion that she claims her doctor encouraged for less-than-accurate medical reasons. Unruh's public story departed from the truth of the situation some time long before Robb got to her — in the course of the research, she admits that Allen Unruh was not her first husband. By her accounting, she met him in 1976 — though a she told the Washington Post they married in 1972. Actually, she married her first husband, Larry Kutzler, in 1973 (while she was, apparently, already pregnant), divorced him in 1977 and it was his child that she aborted "sometime in 1978 or 1979." She married Unruh in late 1978 and had two children with him after that.

In 1984, Unruh opened a crisis pregnancy center, followed by a home for unwed mothers in 1986. In 1987, she pled "no contest" to charges that she paid young women not to have abortions and arranged adoptions without a license. But she'd apparently already decided that the best way to stop abortions was to prevent unwanted pregnancies — but not through birth control. She got into the chastity movement, which started eating from the federal trough after Bill Clinton signed into law his 1996 welfare reform bill — the first time abstinence-only education was federally funded. Like many other government programs, it's only gotten bigger.

Unruh's obsessions include pedophiles, rape, molestation, pornography, disease, peer pressure to have sex and the idea that having multiple sexual partners automatically makes sex less intimate. She swears her daughter never even kissed her own husband until her wedding day. She thinks that taking birth control pills that limit menstruation is an effort to turn women into men. She also loves to hand out dolls of baby fetuses.

It would be — and often is, if you Google Leslee Unruh — easy to mock her politics, her religious beliefs, her fanaticism for her causes and her looks**. But if you're an advocate for reproductive freedom, then mocking her doesn't help your goals any more than demonizing us helps her achieve hers. Leslee maintains a memorial garden for women (and men) to commemorate their abortions and doesn't go off on rants about how women who've had abortions (or premarital sex) are going to hell and — when she's not ranting about Big Pharma wanting to control our uteri, not that any Jezebel would ever hate on the pharmaceutical industry — it's why she's effective. Sometimes, when you're tired or scared or whatever, part of you wants your mom to tell you what to do. And Leslee's apparently very effective at playing Mom and telling you to have the baby.

So who's the Leslee Unruh of the left? Do we even have one? Or in the midst of talking about "safe, legal and rare" to try to convince the right that we're all sort of vaguely in agreement, did we forget to talk enough to scared women about why it's okay to be scared and to have an abortion?

**Please don't body snark her here. There's enough to discuss without that.

Leslee Unruh's Facts Of Life [More]