“…breaking down the usual divisions between categories like art and social activism is liberating, energizing and consciousness-raising for both: art can escape its ivory tower, and activism can be more creative. Utopia rises in the visionary distance.” – Ken Johnson, NYTimes

Women on Waves, featuring Vessel footage, is included in CreativeTime’s exhibit “Living as Form” now showing at Historic Essex Street Market through October 16th.  The exhibit explores 20 years worth of socially engaged art.  Read the NYTimes review here.

The themes explored in Ms. Disney’s work have undeniable crossover into the need for safe access to abortion on a global scale, and the Vessel crew is thrilled to be working with her!  More to come…

So excited to see this online – the TEDx talk about Vessel and the media strategies developing around the film.  Thanks again, TEDxAmazonia, for a fantastic experience, and thanks to all who share the video with anyone who might be interested.

The river was the lowest it’s been in 40 years, and consequently the hotel looked a bit like a very lost cruise ship, run aground, as noted by fellow speaker Chris Carlsson (one of the founders of Critical Mass!).  Fitzcaraldo jokes abounded as tons of amps, camera and sound equipment, and stage settings had to be carried on backs over a path from the tiny marina, as the water was too low to dock at the hotel.  The resulting stage was gorgeous, state-of-the-art, intimidating…

A colorful speakers list: an indigenous clown, a Peruvian dancer, a Brazilian scientist who’d been attacked by a crocodile, an American who studies silence, a gringo Cofan Indian working for land-rights, an artist designing eye-controlled graffiti pens, a biologist named Joan – nee Jonathan – who talked of mistakes biology makes: all vastly different but all seeming to share a common idealism and a warm support for each other.

My talk – which should be online soon – was a call to arms to find ways to bypass deadly, misogynistic, bad law, as example by using video technology to teach women in illegal settings (like Brazil) how to give themselves safe abortions.  I showed a scene from Vessel and included a slide in Portuguese instructing how a woman could take misoprostol correctly (to cheers from the audience), reprinted from the Women on Web site.  Here’s hoping their edit includes the slide so the wider internet audience of TEDxAmazonia can read the info!

The audience of around 500 resembled a crowd in downtown Manhattan: young hipsters, a few older professor philosopher types, computer designers.  Despite their resemblance to my familiar, SO many of the young women came up to me afterwards, with emotional stories about trying to find safe pills in negligible black markets, in what is otherwise a familiar modern lifestyle – something that same crowd in Manhattan doesn’t have to battle.

Abortion has been a political poker chip recently in Brazil, dispensable for votes in the recent presidential election.  Several people commented that the debate has been infuriating and infantile in its denial of reality, and that the pragmatic, uncensored, approach that Vessel posits, that I’ve learned from the ladies at WoW and WoWeb, offers some useful vocabulary for those concerned with women’s lives.

It’s a simple message: the law has no control over whether or not abortions happen, the only thing the law can control is whether or not abortions happen safely, and in places that criminalize or block access to safe abortion, women die.   And as I concluded:

“New technologies, like offshore spaces, provide new areas of negotiable sovereignty, in this case, areas women are using to repossess a sovereignty that has been stripped.  Because no matter when you believe life begins, perhaps we can all agree that a woman determined to end an unwanted pregnancy is, herself, indeed, indisputably, alive.  These pills and a little innovation can help keep her that way until the law catches up with reality.”

The past monday, as per command issued by the Attorney General of the Ecuadorian State, the phone service Moviestar blocked the hotline number created during the Women on Waves campaign last summer and managed by Salud Mujeres  in association with Indymedia Ecuador.  In resistance, the group created a new number: 098 301 317

In their words: “We declare ourselves in disagreement with the criminal laws that discriminate against women and violate the constitution, with those that require us to assume maternity we do not want, and with efforts that keep abortion and the sexuality of women in silence and taboo.”

Read their statement here

Have you ever wondered while watching a documentary film just who exactly is behind the camera?  What about the independent documentaries that are featured at international film festivals in places such as Chicago, Melbourne, or Vancouver?   Well, independent documentary films, just like the big summer
blockbusters which we are all familiar with such as Iron Man 2, have a whole crew behind the scenes helping to bring various topics  into public consciousness.  Diana Whitten is one of these people…

Read more here

From the press release:

A hotline that gives women practical information about sexual and reproductive health in general and the use of a medicine called misoprostol to prevent heavy bleeding of women after giving birth and for inducing safe miscarriage at home, will be launched on Saturday the 25th June. Misoprostol is registered as an essential medicine on the list of the World Health Organization and registered in Pakistan under the brand names Arthrotec, Cytotec, Cytopan, and ST Mom®.

Where: press conference at Hotel Ambassador, 7 Davis Road, Lahore, Pakistan
When: 13:00 hrs, Saturday, 26th June, 2010.

The launch is being carried out by the coalition of Pakistani Organization who support women’s rights: Aware Girls from Khyber Pukhtoonkhwa, Peace Foundation from Sindh and Wake Up Call International from Lahore, The hotline is supported by Asia Safe Abortion Partnership, Women on Waves (Netherlands), and Women on Web.

Women needing information in Pakistan/ hotline numbers:
0307 – 494 07 07 – (Urdu, Punjabi)
0315 – 917 04 08 – (Urdu, Pastho)
0315 – 947 33 99 – (Urdu, Sindhi)

A public hotline giving women information about safe abortion using pills Misoprostol, was launched in Lima, Peru on may 27 th, 2010,
The hotline was launched by the Colectivo para la Libre Información de las Mujeres (CLIM), or Collective for Free Information for Women, a feminist organization dedicated to democratizing vital health information. The hotline is supported by Women on Waves (Netherlands) and is one of similar initiatives that Women on Waves has supported in Ecuador, Argentina, and Chile in the past two years.

Read more: http://www.womenonwaves.org/set-2212-en.html

It was an honor to screen scenes from the film-in-progress at the Womens Inc festival in Amsterdam today, and to be in the presence of so many kickass activists and defenders of human rights.   Check out some of the other festival participants on the Womens Inc festival website.  (though you may have to brush up on your Dutch language or google translate skills…)  Dank je wel, HIVOS, Womens Inc, and Women on Waves!

From Guttmacher:

On February 24, the Spanish senate approved a new law on sexual and reproductive health, which relaxes restrictions on women’s access to abortion. The law allows abortion under any circumstances up to 14 weeks’ gestation and declares the procedure a woman’s right. It also permits abortion at up to 22 weeks if two doctors certify that the pregnancy poses a serious threat to the woman’s life or health, as well as in cases of fetal impairment, and beyond 22 weeks in cases of severe fetal impairment. Previously, safe abortion was widely available in Spain, but was legal only to save the life of a woman, or to preserve her physical and mental health….    read more here