Rebecca Gomperts
Rebecca Gomperts is the founder and director of Women on Waves and Women on Web.
She studied visual arts at the Rietveld Academy and medicine at the University of Amsterdam, the Netherlands. In 2011 Rebecca completed a Masters Public Policy at Princeton University and completed her PhD at Karolinska Institutet in 2014. Time Magazine named abortion activist Rebecca Gomperts in 2020 as one of the 100 most influential people in the world.
After graduating Gomperts became an abortion doctor and sailed with the Greenpeace ship, Rainbow Warrior, as its doctor and as an environmental activist. While sailing in South America she encountered many women who suffered greatly due to lack of access to reproductive heath services and safe, legal abortions. These women and their stories inspired Rebecca Gomperts to start Women on Waves. A documentary on her work, Vessel premiered at South by Southwest Film Festival in 2014, winning the Audience Award for Documentary in Competition and a Special Jury Award for Political Courage.
In response to a growing number of help emails from women around the world, Rebecca founded Women on Web, an online medical abortion service in 2005. The service supports women living in countries where safe abortion is not available, to obtain information and access abortion pills. Every year Women on Web answer more than 100.000 emails from women all over the world.
Rebecca Gomperts also wrote a novel Zeedrift (1999) and published articles and essays. She received the MS Women on the Year award (2001), the Women making History award by Planned Parenthood of New York City (2002), the Clara Meijer-Wichmann Penning (2002) by the Liga voor de Rechten van de Mens, the Margaret Sanger Woman of Valor award (2004) and the Global Women’s Rights Awards (2007) by the Feminist Majority Foundation and the Women deliver 100: the most inspiring people delivering for girls and women (2011). She received the Allan Rosenfield Award for Lifetime Contributions to International Family Planning (2012) and was named as one of the global thinkers by Foreign Policy (2015).
- Documentary: Vessel on the work of Rebecca Gomperts
- Women on Web
- Women on Waves
- NRC - Abortusactivist Rebecca Gomperts: ‘Nederland is niet zo progressief als het denkt dat het is’
