Dr rebecca gomperts biography

Rebecca Gomperts was born in in Paramaribo in Suriname. Gomperts moved to Amsterdam in the mids after high school. She studied conceptual art and completed a four-year art degree at Amsterdam's Rietveld Academyattending medical school at the same time. After graduating from medical school, Gomperts worked in a small hospital in Guiana as a trainee doctor.

Between andGomperts sailed with a Greenpeace ship called the Rainbow Warrior II as a resident physician and environmental activist. After her travels with Greenpeace, Gomperts's interest in reproductive health increased. Gomperts wanted the health damages and death rates from botched at-home abortions to decline, so she designed a program founded upon the radical idea that women could do safe abortions and get medical abortions performed in places where abortion clinics are highly restricted or do not exist at all.

Dr rebecca gomperts biography: Initially she was working as a

Gomperts used contacts she had made during art school to help her design and fund a mobile clinic. This meant that whenever a transport ministry tried to confiscate the container on national waters, the certification of the A-Portable as a sculpture made its border crossing legal. Women on Waves brought non-surgical abortion services and education to countries around the world that did not offer them.

Concerns expressed included the safety of patients traveling to and from the ship, follow-up care to avoid infection, and whether Women on Waves would even be allowed to anchor in some ports to offer training, contraceptives and information. Women on Waves made many voyages. News spread quickly that Gomperts was trying to reach countries where abortion was illegal, and many nations took measures to stop her.

Women on Waves faced many challenges during its voyages. Gomperts appeared on a Portuguese talk show instead. After Women on Waves gained some international recognition, it began to participate in art exhibitions around the world. There were four other exhibitions in where Gomperts collaborated with Willem Velthoven. Every six minutes a red lamp flashed, symbolizing the statistic that a woman dies from an unsafe abortion every six minutes.

After completing her training as an abortion doctor, Rebecca Gomperts worked as a physician on board Greenpeace's ship, the Rainbow Warrior II. In South America she met many women who greatly suffer both physically and psychologically due to unwanted pregnancies and lack of access to safe, legal abortion. There were women who were raped. There were women who had no means of support.

And there were women who were ostracized from their communities. I start reading thank you emails people send to Women on Web. That simple. The next step for Women on Web is re-structuring the organization and streamlining the operation side. We are making the organization more resilient. In an organization, you need different kinds of people.

Dr rebecca gomperts biography: Rebecca Gomperts studied medicine and

There are many things I need to educate myself on. I think reproductive justice issues are discussed only when other things have already been taken care of. And the narratives around the experience of going through an abortion is often the ones that emphasize emotional or physical toll it takes and how it shapes their entire life afterwards. This makes it difficult to normalize talking about abortion or experiences of abortion.

No, we should say yes without exceptions. Access to abortion is a fundamental human right. Share this page. Interview by Geena and Hazal You have been working on abortion rights for almost twenty years. Could you please tell us a bit about your journey and how it all came about? So, how did it go with Women on Waves afterwards? Women on Waves abortion ship sailing to Portugal, Courtesy of Women on Waves When we did the first abortion ship campaign in Ireland inof course, everything went wrong She laughs!

Dr rebecca gomperts biography: Rebecca Gomperts (born ) is a.

Then inyou founded Women on Web, which is known to be the first telemedicine abortion service. How did it happen and what was the biggest challenge for you at that time? Can you tell us about your team at Women on Web? You provide telemedicine abortion in countries with restrictive settings. How do you process solidarity and opposition to your activism in your life?

What motivates you to do your work? That is the most common cause of death among pregnant women. For legal abortion, that figure, by contrast, lies at only one inFor childbirth, the risk is one in 20, Secondly, she learnt from a captain the legal trick and advantages of travelling under the Dutch flag through international waters: state sovereign powers diminish as distance from the coast increases.