The Good Ship Rebecca

In December 2004, Dr. Rebecca Gomperts gave a speech at a Buenos Aires cultural center. Anti-choice activists gathered to protest. They proffered pamphlets and hoisted signs. Some scuffled and threw punches. Gomperts, the Dutch physician who sails to anti-choice nations teaching women about the abortion pill, RU-486 (mifepristone) and, in rare cases, administering the drug in international waters under the pro-choice laws of her ship's Dutch flag, was labeled an "assassin" by angry protesters.

All in a day's work for Gomperts. And all controversy that she converts to activist currency.

Gomperts, the confrontational founder of Women on Waves and one of the world's most hardball activists, spoke to AlterNet recently from her group's headquarters in the Netherlands. She talked about confrontations with Portuguese warships, Polish right-wing nationalists, the growing threats to reproductive rights and the global backfires of Bush administration family planning policies. The 39-year-old doctor has joined the high-profile likes of Gloria Steinem and Planned Parenthood's Gloria Feldt in an uphill battle to secure reproductive rights in the face of theocracy and overreaching conservatism.

A conversation with Gomperts reveals a tendency for deep understatement ("Yes, some of the people in Argentina got a little excited"), and passion filtered through concise, unwavering, seemingly unemotional responses.

Her mind is a motor. Ask her to pause, and the mental clutch engages for a nanosecond, releases, wraps up unfinished points, and then takes another call, before coming back to the subject of dead mothers and daughters. Like 27-year-old Gerri Santoro, mother of two, who died in 1964 from a botched illegal abortion. She was found dead in a Connecticut motel room, naked, squatting over bloody rags, left to die by an abortionist who used borrowed medical tools and a textbook as guide. The grizzly police photo of Santoro's corpse is posted on Gomperts' website, a crude reminder of the undeniable reasoning that drives her: "Women are dying. Women are dying because of illegal abortions. And the death of these women is preventable."

Between 1950 and 1985 most developed countries liberalized their abortion laws. But at least 25 percent of the world's population still lives in countries where abortion is illegal, mostly in Latin America, Africa and Asia. The Alan Guttmacher Institute, a think tank, says 350 million couples around the world lack information about contraception and modern methods of family planning, even as some 80 million unwanted pregnancies occur around the world each year, according to Planned Parenthood.

According to the World Health Organization, unsafe abortions kill more than 78,000 women each year.

"I must be honest," Gomperts says, "I am quite concerned with developments around the world, and this is especially true in the United States. Anti-abortion stances of Bush have had a tremendous effect worldwide, especially as he exports abstinence-only sex education."

Art Before Activism

A self-described "artist in first instance," Gomperts studied art but took to medicine as a career. She eventually specialized in radiology, which didn't fulfill her. It was during a stint at a Dutch abortion clinic that she found her calling. It wasn't, she says, a political decision. She was fascinated by the work. And she wanted to save lives, make obvious differences, and later, as an activist, to bear witness. "I felt for the first time that I was really making a difference for women," she says.

The idea to deliver abortion services on the high seas came to her in 1997 and '98, while she was volunteering as a doctor on the Greenpeace ship Rainbow Warrior II.

"We had gone to Mexico and the women told me terrible stories," she recalls. "One woman had an unwanted pregnancy and was looking for someone to help her. She had been raped but couldn't denounce the rapist because she was looking to have an illegal abortion. Another girl I met, around 20, had lost her mother when she was 12 years old. The mother had been pregnant for the fifth time and died from a backstreet abortion. The 12-year-old then had to take care of her brothers and sisters together with her father.