Dialogue with the Frontline engages Ipas country directors, supporters

Susan Hill, executive director of the National Women's Health Organization said, "“If a woman decides she needs to have an abortion, nothing will stop her. Nothing."

Ipas supporters gathered last week to meet the women and men working to ensure safe abortion services for women worldwide, in a Dialogue with the Frontline. The event took place during the annual meeting of Ipas’s country directors, visiting from Latin America, Africa, Asia and Europe. The keynote address was given by Susan Hill, executive director of the National Women’s Health Organization (NWHO), a company that owns abortion clinics in some of the most underserved areas of the United States.

Hill has been working to deliver safe abortion services for more than 30 years, since she opened the first abortion clinic in North Carolina in 1973. Since then, she has been a plaintiff in 34 lawsuits to defend women’s access to safe abortion services; NWHO’s seven clinics have faced more than 20,000 protesters (including 1,000 for three weeks straight in Ft. Wayne, IN), 18 arsons and countless acts of vandalism. She spoke about what drove her to keep expanding services in the face of violence and intimidation.

“If a woman decides she needs to have an abortion, nothing will stop her. Nothing,” she said. “She will go through protesters.  She will find an illegal abortionist.”

It was all the more important, then that women have access to compassionate care. “You’re here to give women a safe place to come to exercise their rights,” she said.

“I really believe that unless women can have abortions in the places where they live, then abortion will never be fully accepted.”

Country directors noted that Hill’s remarks reflected the experience of the doctors and midwives Ipas works with around the world. The event was a rare opportunity for Ipas supporters to talk directly to Ipas leaders about the issues women in their countries face when dealing with an unwanted pregnancy. Participants were assigned to discussion groups in which they were given information about a particular country and a fictional woman faced with an unwanted pregnancy (based on real cases), and then asked “What would you do?” With the country director, they talked through the barriers a woman might face – of distance, culture and language – and how Ipas was working to eliminate those barriers.

The exercise along with Hill’s speech helped participants come closer to experiences of real women that defined their support for abortion rights. By getting close to these women, the importance of what Ipas and groups like the National Women’s Health Organization do becomes even clearer and more urgent.

“The beauty of doing this work for 33 years is that we get to help women make the decisions that were right for them,” she said. “I think we’ll all be able to live peacefully when we retire, seeing all the faces of the women we’ve served.”

For more information, contact:
Kirsten Sherk
Senior Associate, Media Relations
e-mail: sherkk@ipas.org
phone: 919.960.5612
fax: 919.929.0258