Last week, Dr. Randall K. O’Bannon, offered a look ahead at what even some pro-abortion supporters dubbed a “stunt”: using a drone to fly abortifacients from a location in Omeath, Ireland, to a spot across the river to somewhere near Narrow Water in Northern Ireland on Tuesday.
I’ve looked at the news accounts yesterday and today and not surprisingly discovered that Dr. O’Bannon’s story was 100% on the mark.
So how did the wildly pro-abortion Irish Times describe the demonstration, organized by the Dutch group Women on Waves [WOW] , Northern Irish group Alliance for Choice, Irish group Rosa, and Northern Irish group Labour Alternative?
The stunt, described as an act of solidarity, aimed to highlight the strict laws around terminations that exist on both sides of the Irish border [Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland].
All the stories I read were limited variations on a very tendentious theme. Ireland’s and Northern Ireland’s abortion laws are repressive, Middle Age-esque, archaic, etc., etc. The flight was to “mark the different reality for Irish women to access safe abortion services compared to women in other European countries where abortion is legal.”
Organizers insist they did nothing illegal and police did not seize anything or arrest anyone. One unlikely explanation is, “According to Women on Waves, the fact that the countries have different laws means it’s not illegal to deliver abortion pills via drone across the border.” A more likely explanation is that police probably intended to minimize the PR boost the pro-abortion groups might garner.
To be clear the issue was not and is not whether women took mifepristone and misoprostol. Having read stories going in and coming out, it is unclear to me whether any of the women who ingested the abortifacients were, in fact, pregnant. I’m guessing not.
As Dr. O’Bannon wrote last Friday, Rebecca Gomperts, the abortion activist from Women on Waves (WOW), has a long track record in abortion promotion. She first launched the “abortion ship” in 2001, anchoring the boat in international waters off the Irish coast, promising women they could come aboard to abort with pills. It is believed that no actual abortions were performed then or the next year, but Gomperts drew publicity for her cause, nonetheless, agitating for new laws.
Gomperts teamed with some local abortion activists in October of 2014 for an “abortion train” which took women from Dublin to Northern Ireland to pick up abortion pills which they publicly took when they returned. Some of the same groups were involved in the “abortion bus” which toured Ireland in October of 2015, inviting women on the bus to privately consult with a Women on Waves doctor about abortion pills. There was some ambiguity in the press coverage about whether or not there were actual abortifacients on the bus.
The latest “abortion drone” sounds very similar to an abortion drone stunt Women on Waves performed in June of last year, flying packets of pills across a river from Germany to Poland (see NRL News Today, 6/23/15 and 6/30/15). They claimed everything was legally vetted, but German police appeared to confiscate computer pads used by the drone pilots once the drones were away. And though it was not widely advertised, activists admitted to the press that the women taking the pills were not pregnant at the time.
The point was not to establish some standard drone shipping route, but simply to draw attention to Poland’s abortion and use that to exert pressure on politicians to change the laws.
Editor’s note. If you want to peruse stories all day long, go directly to nationalrighttolifenews.org
Chelsea Garcia is a political writer with a special interest in international relations and social issues. Events surrounding the war in Ukraine and the war in Israel are a major focus for political journalists. But as a former local reporter, she is also interested in national politics.
Chelsea Garcia studied media, communication and political science in Texas, USA, and learned the journalistic trade during an internship at a daily newspaper. In addition to her political writing, she is pursuing a master's degree in multimedia and writing at Texas.
