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4 J.L. & Equal. 93 (2005)
Interview with Dr. Rebecca Gomperts

handle is hein.journals/jleq4 and id is 159 raw text is: INTERVIEW WITH DR. REBECCA GOMPERTS On October 7, 2005, Dr. Rebecca Gomperts, Founder and Director of Women on Waves, spoke at the Faculty of Law, University of Toronto in a presentation entitled Abortion: a threat to national security? Women on Waves operates a mobile abortion clinic on a ship that sails to countries where abortion is legally restricted or prohibited. With the assistance and invitation of local women's organizations, Dr. Gomperts and others are able to provide contraceptives, information, training and workshops on sexual health. In additions to these services, the medical staff can also provide safe and legal early medical abortion care. The goal of Women on Waves is to prevent unsafe abortions and empower women through the provision of free healthcare services and sexual education in combination with legal advocacy to liberalize abortion laws. The ship, which first docked in Ireland in 2001, lead to the founding of Doctors Pro Choice and the rejection of a referendum proposing stricter abortion legislation in Ireland. Since then, Women on Waves has also sailed to Poland and Portugal. Dr. Gomperts' lecture was sponsored by the International Programme on Reproductive and Sexual Health Law, the International Human Rights Program, the Centre for Innovation Law and Policy and the Centre for Research in Women's Health. 1. Many physicians and women's health advocates, such as yourself, have chosen to go beyond the clinical realm of individual patient care and provision of services to advocate for legal reform at the health systems level, often at great personal and professional risk. What inspired you to move from providing services to individual women as a physician to taking on a larger advocacy role in challenging restrictive abortion laws in other countries? Did a single experience motivate you to act or did you gradually recognize the need to act? To the extent that ideas have a genesis that one can reconstruct, I suppose that it grew out of my experiences sailing with the Greenpeace ship, the Rainbow Warrior, after my training as an abortion doctor. In South America, I met many women who suffer greatly both physically and psychologically due to unwanted pregnancies and lack of access to safe, legal abortions. As a doctor and a woman, I was shocked when I learned about the consequences of restricted sexual education, restricted access to contraception, and illegal abortion.

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