Activists Who Condemned Illegal Abortions Now Push Do-It-Yourself Abortions
Photo Credit: LifeNews
According to an article written by Emily Bazelon appearing in last Thursday’s New York Times (8/28/14), they’re all key pieces of the abortion industry’s transition from relying almost exclusively on standard brick and mortar clinics that performed surgical abortions to a new model where chemical abortifacients can be ordered over the internet or purchased over the counter and performed at home by women on themselves—hence the acronym D-I-Y (Do-It-Yourself) abortions.
RebeccaGompertsBazelon’s article, “The Dawn of the Post-Clinic Abortion,” begins largely as a profile piece on Rebecca Gomperts (right). As we will explained later in this story, while Gomperts herself is not currently working in countries where abortion is legal, abortion activists in the United States are watching her “radical idea of providing abortions without direct contact with a doctor” with great interest. (NRL News Today last wrote about Gomperts, a Dutch general-practice physician, at “’Women on Waves’ bringing abortions performed off shore to Morocco.”)
Gomperts is the former Greenpeace activist who launched the “Abortion Ship” from the Netherlands in June of 2001, heading for the coast of Ireland on a ship stocked with abortion pills—mifepristone (RU-486) and the prostaglandin misoprostol. She called her effort “Women on Waves.”
The plan was to anchor just outside Ireland’s coastal boundary and have women ferried out to the ship to take the pills and start their abortions. However disputes over licensing and strategy kept the group from performing any abortions there.
Read more from this story HERE.
