Rebecca Gomperts

Vessel, a documentary about Gomperts' mission of Women on Waves premiered in 2014 at the Southwest Film Festival. This documentary witnesses the creation of a network of reproductive health activists lead by Gomperts. It shows their work on global reproductive rights, and the conceptual idea of trusting women to handle their own abortions. The story of transforming a widely improbable idea into a global movement is a moving picture that captured Gomperts' legacy entirely.

This is when in 2005, Gomperts' second organization Women on Web was founded. In 2016 Women on Web was receiving over 10,000 emails a month from over 123 countries across the world. Women could ask questions that ranged from how to administer abortion pills, to advice on contraceptives, to even relationship consulting. Instead of delivering abortion pills from the sea, Women on Web uses packages and drones to send pills and instructions for safe, at-home abortions.

On July 12, 2003 the Mediamatic Supermarket entrance was blocked with the A-Portable. This interactive exhibition presented by Mediamatic was their final installation of their Women On Waves exhibition. It allowed viewers to walk into the portable container that was transformed into an abortion clinic and sailed across international waters.

The A-Portable was exhibited in the 49th Venice Biennale in 2001. Being a key work in the exhibition, it was presented on a raft, floating just out in the waters at the Arsenale.

There were four other exhibitions in 2001 where Gomperts collaborated with Willem Velthoven. These four installations, Portrait Collector, Sea, I Had An Abortion and Every 6 Minutes were presented in the Mediamatic Women on Waves show.

Gompets formed her organization Women on Waves in 1999, after she got back from her voyage on the Rainbow Warrior II. Women on Waves was bringing non-surgical abortion services and education to countries all around the world that didn't have them. The Women on Waves mission transcends the boundaries between law, medicine, seafaring and art.

After graduating from medical school, Gompert worked in a small hospital in Guiana as a trainee doctor. This is where 25-year-old she witnessed the realities of illegal abortions for the first time. As of 1997 she was a 31-year old doctor based in Amsterdam who performed legal abortions.

Between 1997-1998, Gomperts sailed with a Greenpeace ship called the Rainbow Warrior II as a resident doctor and environmental activist. She sailed through Latin America, visiting Romani and Guinea.

Gomperts moved to Amsterdam in the mid 1980s after high school. Having an interest for both the arts and sciences, Gomperts studied visual arts and medicine. She completed a four-year art degree at Amsterdam's Rietveld Academy studying conceptual art, while at the same time attending medical school. As she found that art was not the path she wanted to follow, she dived into the world of medicine; Gomperts did not find her calling in the field of reproductive medicine until later on in her medical career.

Rebecca Gomperts (born 1966) is a doctor based in Amsterdam and is the founder of Women on Waves and Women on Web, which provides reproductive health services for women in countries where it is not provided. In 2013 and 2014, she was included in the BBC's 100 Women. In 2018, she founded Aid Access, which operates in the United States. A trained abortion specialist and activist, she is generally considered the first abortion rights activist to cross international borders.

Rebecca Gomperts was born in 1966 in Paramaribo in Suriname. She moved to Netherlands at the age of three and grew up in the harbor town of Vlissingen. Her movements around Europe at an early age inbred international consciousness in her that would drive her future career.