Abortion Ship Doctor Slams Irish Policy

[Editor's Note: This post was written by Tracy Brown Hamilton, a journalist based in Amsterdam. It originally appeared on Rabble.ie.]

Photo credit: WOW Facebook page.

News broke over the weekend that a woman in Ireland was forced to bear her rapist’s child having been denied an abortion after going on hunger strike. Tracy Brown Hamilton chatted to Rebecca Gomperts of Woman On Waves about how Ireland’s laws are failing women.

The Protection of Life in Pregnancy Act of 2013 was ostensibly going to help secure a woman’s rights, and sparked outrage from Ireland’s pro-life community. But the policy is flawed, according to Dr. Rebecca Gomperts, 47.

“It’s ridiculous,” Gomperts says. “Women are dying and suffering health problems. Human rights are being violated. It was bad before, but now it’s worse. This policy won’t help women.”

Gomperts is the founder and director of Women on Waves, an organization that, among other things, sails a ship to countries where pregnancy termination is prohibited and offers non-surgical abortions beyond territorial waters.

Ireland Campaign

In 2001, Women on Waves launched their first ship campaign – to Ireland.

“There is a very dedicated pro-choice community there,” Gomperts says, “and they were very interested in the project.”

The number of women who sought Gomperts’ services exceeded anyone’s expectations. “The groups we worked with said, ‘no woman is going to come to a ship for an abortion’,” Gomperts recalls. “But we had 80 calls immediately, and realized we had not brought enough pills.”

Those who responded included women who had been raped, schoolgirls who could not find a feasible excuse to go to England for a couple of days, mothers who could not afford childcare while away in England, and political refugees who did not have the papers to travel.

In the end, because they did not have two necessary licenses from the Dutch and Irish authorities –one for operating medical facilities and the other for carrying passengers to sea – Women on Waves was unable to distribute the abortion pill.

Regardless, hundreds of Irish women continued to reach out to Gomperts for help.

Non-Surgical Abortion

According to Gomperts, the abortion pill – mifepristone and misoprostol – can be safely used to terminate pregnancies up to 12 weeks at home, without medical supervision.

“The World Health Organisation has published guidelines that say women can do this,” she says. “So there is no need for surgical abortion anymore. The only issue is getting women access to the pills.”

To that end, Gomperts has created an international network to help women around the world find a means of getting the abortion pill. “We are not selling drugs,” she clarifies. “We are a referral service; we help women get a medical abortion at home. But they risk prosecution if it’s illegal in their country.”

And under Ireland’s new abortion policy, punishment has become stricter. “The sentence for such an ‘illegal’ abortion in Ireland used to be three years,” Gomperts says, “and now they have made it twelve years.”

Dr. Gomperts smiles on the telephone during a recent action in Smir, Morocco. Photo credit: WOW Facebook page. 

No Link to Depression

The new law also removes the possibility of suicide risk as a means of permitting legal abortions. “Of course it was already problematic if you are forcing someone to say they are suicidal just to obtain an abortion,” she says, “but now even that is not allowed.”

Gomperts strongly opposes claims that abortion can lead to mental distress or illness.

“There have been lots of scientific studies published in major journals,” she says, “that show there is no link between depression or suicide and abortion. None.”

Statistics of women who express regret after terminating a pregnancy can be misconstrued, Gomperts finds. “Our data shows that 1 percent of women regret it,” she says. “But a lot of women mean they regret being in the position to begin with. That’s different.”

A Selfless Decision

Gomperts has encountered many women who have been surprised to find themselves opting for termination. “They tell me, ‘I am against abortion, but my situation is different,’” she says. “It takes a certain degree of empathy to extend that reasoning to other people, or to realize that perhaps you are not against abortion after all.”

People are too judgmental about abortion, Gomperts says.

“For me, it’s obvious that it’s a selfless decision,” she says. “There are women who, if they had the right conditions, may make a different choice. But when women really find they don’t have what it takes to raise a child in a good situation, then abortion is a very moral decision.”

Social Justice Issue

Gomperts, who has two children, says she is a doctor first and an activist second. “As a doctor, I’m here to aid in the well being of people,” she says. “And if you want to make sure that the well being of women is being guaranteed, you have to legalize abortion. For me it’s completely about social justice. The problem with many health issues today, including abortion, is that it comes down to who has the means to access the care.”

Abortion and Unnecessary Death: A Multicultural Issue

For too long the word abortion has been associated with politicians; it has become a slogan of where your politics lie. Last month, we saw a victim to the ping-pong of abortion politics. It took the death of Savita Halappanavar to bring a human face to this issue, an innocent victim killed by warped policy.

Savita Halappanavar died on October 28, 2012 of blood poisoning, after being denied a termination that could have saved her life. Savita has become an unlikely hero of the abortion rights movement. Extreme politicians such as the UK’s Nadine Dorris claim that women who seek abortions are young, reckless, or career women who have "convenience abortions." Savita was the antithesis of this. A 31-year-old dentist, a married Indian woman who had immigrated to Ireland. Savita was admitted into hospital miscarrying her 17-week-old pregnancy. She asked for an abortion and was denied.

 Her husband recollected "Savita asked if they could not save the baby could they induce to end the pregnancy. The consultant said: 'As long as there is a fetal heartbeat we can't do anything.'" Again on Tuesday morning, the ward rounds and the same discussion. The consultant said it was the law, that this is a Catholic country. Savita (an Indian Hindu) said "I am neither Irish nor Catholic," but they said there was nothing they could do.  Ireland, a Catholic country, has some of the world’s strictest laws regarding abortion. The controversy before Savita’s death was that women in Ireland had to travel to Britain to receive an abortion. This, of course, created huge barriers in terms of time frame, cost, and access. And in Savita’s case she was too ill to travel to England.

PETER MUHLY / AFP / GETTY IMAGES

Medical professionals take a Hippocratic oath to save a life first and foremost. Policy makers that value the unborn fetus as more important than the life of a woman, hinder this. When risk of prosecution looms over a medical professional's head, he or she has no incentive to save a woman’s life through abortion. The reality is that it often takes a tragic event like this to bring policy to the forefront of peoples' minds. Unfortunately, unlike other policies such as vitamin fortification that are supported across all organizations, abortion is throttled by religious intervention. Savita, a Hindu, became a victim of a policy against abortion heavily supported by the Catholic Church.

For many, it brought forward the concept that if you are Catholic you are under no obligation to have an abortion. Neither is a Hindu woman, but if a simple procedure such as removing a dying fetus to save her life is requested, this should be available to any woman regardless of religion.

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CLIO TALKS BACK: Why did so many young Irish women leave Ireland?

Early Irish Immigrants

In the years 1885-1920 nearly 700,000 mostly single women under the age of 24 left family farms in Ireland to seek a better life in the cities of North America. They travelled by themselves across the Atlantic Ocean. No family members – no fathers, mothers, husbands or brothers accompanied them. Single women emigrants from Ireland in these years outnumbered male emigrants – exceptional among European migrants to the New World.

Why did so many young Irish women emigrate? In those years of great deprivation following the famine years when Ireland’s potato crops collapsed, they simply sought a better life, one which would – according to Janet Nolan – allow them to reclaim their earlier status, to earn their keep, to marry as they chose, and – most of all – to create lives free of severe hardship. Many (well over two-thirds) first sought employment as domestic servants in the cities of the eastern United States. They generally married after a few years and often bore large numbers of children. Upwardly mobile, many of the offspring of the families these young women founded, obtained an education and became wildly successful by the standards of the land their mothers had abandoned.

What is striking in Nolan’s account of this emigration in her book, “Ourselves Alone,” was that, very unusual for the times, the young women’s travel was mostly financed by female relatives. Networks of older women helping younger women. Older women sending back money to help their little sisters and nieces emigrate as they had. In Nolan’s words (p. 95),“They were the first generation of Irish women to realize fully their own social and economic modernization as women.”

Then, when the emigrant women were settled in their new country, many of them sent money home to assist those who had remained behind – for example, to purchase a horse to replace the one that had died. Ironically, “the most expendable group in post-Famine Ireland – dependent daughters and sisters – became the saviors of a society that could not have remained intact save by their emigration and their remittances” (p. 71).

Some of these emigrant women and their daughters became prominent labor organizers in the U.S. Nolan names Kate Mullany, organizer of the laundry workers in Troy, New York; Leonora Barry, head of the women’s work committee for the Knights of Labor; Mary Kenny O’Sullivan, of the A. F. L. [American Federation of Labor]; Leonora O’Reilly, of the Women’s Trade Union League; and Mother Jones (Mary Harris Jones) and Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, respectively founder and leader of the Industrial Workers of the World. All these women activists supported equal pay for equal work and the rights of laboring women.

Clio celebrates the courage and initiative of these thousands of Irish emigrant women to bettering their condition by “packing up and leaving,” to create new lives in a new country.

Source: Janet Ann Nolan, Ourselves Alone: Women’s Emigration From Ireland, 1885-1920 (University of Kentucky Press, 1989).