BY SARAH STEPHEN
On June 14, a converted fishing boat, the Sea of Change, docked in Dublin, Ireland, its first stop in a pilot project to offer safe access to pregnancy terminations, family planning and contraception to women in countries which lack it — and were almost immediately forced back to its home port in Holland again.
The Dutch government claimed that the ship had left port without a proper medical inspection, a turn of events a spokesperson for the project described as turning "a technical issue ... into been a political one". The ship plans to return within a month.
Abortion is illegal in Ireland, except in cases where the life of the mother is in danger. Women who want their pregnancies terminated have to travel to Britain or continental Europe to do so; 6000 such trips are made to Britain each year.
The Sea of Change, an initiative of the Dutch-based Women on Waves Foundation, seeks to redress this. The foundation has developed a mobile gynaecological unit, the "A-Portable", which can be easily loaded onto a ship or a truck and taken to countries where it is needed.
The eight person crew includes a gynaecologist and a nurse, who will also provide in-port family planning advice, contraceptives and workshops on reproductive health issues for lawyers, doctors, teachers and politicians. The ship would sail out into international waters to perform surgical abortions, meaning that the ship's doctors are acting under Dutch law, which allows abortion.
During the single night that the ship was docked in Dublin, 250 women contacted the ship's doctors seeking information or consultations.
The vessel and its crew is captained by Dutch doctor Rachel Gomperts, formerly ship's doctor on the Greenpeace vessel Rainbow Warrior. She founded Women on Waves to highlight the restrictions on women and the problems of back-street abortions in countries where terminations are banned.
"We hope to provide a catalyst for legislation", Gomperts said, "We simply want to give women a choice. Public awareness is the first step."
The ship's visit drew predictable condemnation from Ireland's anti-choice lobby, however. Marie Vernon, spokesperson for the Dublin-based Society for the Protection of the Unborn Child, called the trip "a mad feminist stunt".
"I can't see Irish women gathering at the dockside to be collected and taken out to the abortion ship. Abortion is a very private thing", she said. Only one anti-choice demonstrator dared to turn up to protest, however.
The crew hopes that this pilot program will be the forerunner for a permanent mission, which will include parts of Africa.
More than one third of pregnancies worldwide are unplanned and a quarter of these — about 53 million — end in abortion. Some 25% of the world's population live in countries with highly restrictive abortion laws.
Abortions are still carried out in these countries — illegally — but the often unsafe methods lead to complications in about 40% of cases and to more than 70,000 deaths a year.
Where abortion is legal, safe and available, complication rates are less than 1%. Yet the current state of abortion access means that every five minutes, somewhere around the world, a woman dies from an unsafe abortion.
[Visit Women on Waves' web site at .]