Vessel

The Society of International Affairs in Gothenburg in co-operation with Cinema Politica welcomes you to the first film club of the year 2015, screening Vessel. This movie has not only received terrorist threats but also actual attack and aggression from anti-choice activists. Vessel shows how a group of women led by Dr. Rebecca Gomperts, endeavoured to provide abortions to women who lives in states that banned or restricted abortion. In order to do so they develop the movements Women on Waves and Women on Web.

The screening is free and open for everyone.

Vessel begins with a young doctor who lived by the sea, and an unlikely idea. Rebecca Gomperts, horrified by the realities created by anti-abortion law around the world, felt compelled to challenge this issue; her method: provide abortions on a ship in offshore waters.

Her project, Women on Waves, begins as flawed spectacle, a media frenzy, faced with governmental, religious, and military blockades. But with each setback comes a more refined mission, until Rebecca has the revelation that she can use new technologies to bypass law – and train women to give themselves safe abortions using WHO-sanctioned protocols with pills.

We witness the creation of an underground network of emboldened, informed activists, working at the cutting edge of global reproductive rights, who trust women to handle abortion themselves. Vessel is Rebecca’s story: one of a woman who heard and answered a calling, and transformed a wildly improbable idea into a global movement