On 11 June 2001, Women on Waves set sail from the Netherlands with an almost entirely female crew for the Republic of Ireland, a country with the most restrictive abortion law in Europe. Women on Waves was invited by several Irish abortion rights organisations.
Press coverage Ireland 2001
More than 200 Irish and international journalists attend the press conference. The ship Aurora is front page news all over the world. BBC Worldnews, CNN, ABC, NBC and numerous other networks and news agencies cover this groundbreaking event.
Positive press coverage appears in several Irish newspapers. One journalist even apologizes for her middle-class mentality as she had assumed in an earlier article that all Irish women could easily travel to England and that there would be no need for the ship. Another surprise is the CNN online opinion poll. Of the 16,500 participants, 49% are in favor of the ship’s activities.Due to the overwhelming amount of media all over the world, the press list that follows is incomplete.
What happened in Ireland?
Sailing to Ireland
The aim of the trip was to highlight the hypocrisy of the Irish abortion situation; catalyse efforts to liberalise the abortion law there; to build coalitions for legislative reform; and to test the feasibility of using a ship as a reproductive health clinic. The trip was made at the invitation of the Dublin Abortion Rights Group and Cork Women's Right to Choose group. Our plan was to provide reproductive health services on a ship, including the abortion pill, outside Ireland's territorial waters, and through that activity to publicise the fact that approximately 6,500 women from the Irish Republic travel to Britain for abortions each year.
The mobile clinic
The mobile clinic was designed and build by Joep van Lieshout
