Reproductive rights exist at a strange nexus of politics and public health; whether or not they should is another issue, but it’s currently hard to address the issue without considering the political implications. Vessel takes this tension to the international level, telling the story of Women on Waves, founded by Dutch doctor Rebecca Gomperts, an organization based around a ship with an abortion clinic onboard that can travel to countries whose laws prohibit abortions to pick up women and take them out to international waters where the laws of the ship’s home country (in this case Holland) apply. It’s a bold and original strategy for providing access to care, but it’s also flaunting national sovereignty, essentially using the M.O. of pirates for medical reasons.
Gomperts and her crew try to downplay the political significance of what they’re doing and use more neutral medical terminology – “We are here to save women’s lives,” which they certainly succeed in doing throughout the film. Women on Waves’ strategy takes them and the fight for legal abortion to places where that fight is most difficult; heavily religious and conservative countries where abortion is barely spoken of openly, let alone provided in a safe, medical setting. There are many tense scenes in the film of angry crowds meeting the ship in the harbor, while Gomperts and her crew calmly assert their right to be there. The symbolic impact of these women staring down mobs (always covered on local TV) likely convinced many women of the seriousness of Women on Waves.
While the anti-abortion forces make themselves known publicly, something both Gomperts and the film repeatedly prove is that there are just as many women who need safe reproductive care, but they are shamed and bullied into searching for it clandestinely; as soon as the organization is founded, they are inundated with emails asking for help, from women who say they have nowhere else to turn and will be outcasts if they discuss their pregnancies openly.
By the second half of the film, the organization is functioning less as a mobile clinic than as a disseminator of information, working in tandem with their sister group Women on the Web to inform women how to safely use misoprostal, which is available in most pharmacies worldwide. The most heart-wrenching scenes in the film show email exchanges of women going through the procedure, with only their email correspondents for support. Vessel details a group of women that not only undertook an eminently practical method of providing care to women without any, but also made themselves into powerful symbols of female strength, taking to the seas and daring anyone to stop them. No one has yet.
