Rebecca Gomperts Is Trying to Save the World for Abortion nytimes.com
Meanwhile, in honor of the one time official topic of this thread, from that notorious source of unfairandimblanced coverage, an article about a real Pro Choice Action Team.
In several years of quiet fund-raising for Women on Waves, including a three-week visit to the United States last year, Gomperts met with mixed results. Among American abortion rights leaders, many of whom practice a policy-oriented form of activism, she received a round of cautious endorsement but little in the way of financial help. ''I think some people probably thought she was crazy,'' says Julie Kay, an American lawyer specializing in reproductive rights who met with Gomperts in Dublin last December. ''I know when I first heard about her, I thought: Abortions at sea? Who is this woman? Is she some sort of cowboy doctor?''
The idea is admittedly radical. It also invites a host of logistical questions -- from how to provide follow-up care to how to keep abortion foes from sinking the ship. But Gomperts, who used grant money from a Dutch feminist organization to research her plan, insists that her floating clinic is both feasible and necessary. If access to legal abortion is, as she says, an essential cornerstone in a woman's right to control her own reproduction, then statistics show that 25 percent of the world lives without it. Abortion is illegal under most circumstances in most of Latin America and much of Africa and Asia. Meanwhile, the World Health Organization reports that at least 78,000 women die each year as a result of unsafe abortions. What is wrong, Gomperts argues, with creating a Greenpeace-style stir over 78,000 dead women? |
