administered correctly. "When I started Women on Waves, the
abortion pill was only just registered in the Netherlands, and I had
no idea of its potential at that moment,” Rebecca explains. “It was
by doing the work that I realised how important the pills were. It’s
really revolutionary! Before they existed, women were dependent
on people who knew their anatomy to have a safe abortion –
doctors, nurses or midwives."
Rebecca has been a pioneer in the distribution of abortion pills,
which have caused a huge shift in the power relationship between
women and the medical establishment that often seeks to control
their bodies. "You don’t need to be a doctor to provide information
on how they work – anyone can do that. It can be the internet, it
can be women’s groups, it can be a friend. But that information
needs to be disseminated," she says.
Realising this, Rebecca started another organisation in 2005,
Women on Web, which mails abortion pills to ladies around the
globe. It's the same practical, innovative spirit that led her to found
Women on Waves, but it provides women with even more autonomy
to decide their own fate. "We started training local women’s rights
organisations, helping them set up safe abortion hotlines so that
people could access this information," she says. "And it changed
the whole landscape. It was very empowering for women’s rights
groups, because before they were limited to protesting for changes
to the law, whereas this really helps women in a very concrete way.
There are now safe abortion hotlines all over Latin America."
Since its launch, Women on Web has helped more than 50,000
ladies perform medical abortions at home. The organisation
receives 10,000 emails per month in 17 languages. They recently
began mailing pills to the USA, where more than 600 women have
now accessed the service. Medical abortion pills were also a keyissue in the recent Irish referendum, where 66 per cent of voters
came out in favour of legalising abortion.
"We have been extremely active in Ireland over the last couple
of years,” Rebecca says. “We published a lot of research on how
many women are using the abortion pill in Ireland, and their
experiences with it. So suddenly there was this debate about it.
We had abortion drones, and abortion robots, and abortion
buses, and abortion trains, and there was an enormous, intense
campaign with them. Women are not really travelling to the UK
anymore – actually, they are having illegal abortions on Irish soil,
and that changed the whole dynamic."
The picture Rebecca paints is both appalling and optimistic.
While abortion remains heavily restricted, her activism proves
that there’s always a way around the opposition, even when the
situation has been hopeless for many years. It also shows the
increasing futility of countries using their legal systems to control
abortion access, given the rise of new channels for feminist
activism, such as ocean shipping routes, drones that fly pills
over borders, or simply accessing the internet.
But Rebecca is certain that abortion law reform is still critical, and
there’s more ground to shift, even in places with progressive legal
systems. "Initially, I thought as long as women have access to the
pills, it’s fine,” she says. “But I changed my mind. We have to fight
for legalisation of abortion as well, because many women are not
literate, and many women cannot access the internet. There’s
more work to do in countries where it’s legal, like the Netherlands,
Australia and the UK, to make sure it becomes really widely
available and free. If women have to pay for an abortion, many
will not be able to afford it. In order to create social justice, abortions
have to be free and available around the corner."Illustration
Cass Urquhart
real life