Aid Access, an organization of the Dutch doctor Rebecca Gomperts that provides online abortion pills, says that the demand from the United States is increasing. Gomperts states in an interview with the French news agency AFP that some people “have panicked”.
According to Gomperts, the reason for the panic is the fear that the US Supreme Court will cancel the constitutional right to abortion next month. In that case, about twenty US states appear to be planning to ban abortion or severely restrict the right to abortion for women.
“We are already seeing a huge increase in the number of requests,” says 55-year-old Gomperts. Since 2018, her organization Aid Access has been distributing abortion pills over the internet. Earlier this year, Gomperts received the Aletta Jacobs Prize 2022 from the University of Groningen (RUG), because of her fight for abortion rights and access to safe and legal abortion for women. The jury stated that Gomperts managed to get abortion high on the political agenda in various countries with its organizations Women on Waves, Women on Web and Aid Access. In 2020, the doctor was already on the list of the 100 most influential people of the American magazine Time.
In the past, Gomperts used her ‘abortion boat’ to anchor in international waters off the coast of countries such as Poland, Spain and Mexico, in order to offer medical abortions on that boat to women who wish to have such a safe abortion in the countries concerned. couldn’t get.
The possible decision by the US Supreme Court has now “made people aware of how vulnerable they are,” the doctor said.
The demand from the US was also high before the intentions of the Supreme Court were recently leaked. In just over a year (October 2020 to December 2021), Aid Access said it received more than 45,000 requests for abortion pills from the United States. The reasons for those requests vary: high costs for other abortion services, the expense and effort of traveling to distant abortion clinics, and the inability to do so due to work or child care.
After completing a questionnaire, the women receive instructions on how to take the pills at home. The price is adjusted according to their financial capacity and the pills are mailed from a pharmacy in India. Aid Access will contact the women after that dispatch.