Dr. Rebecca Gomperts | Woman of the Year 2022
25.10.2022 - 18:09
/ glamour.com
on women in the private hospital where he worked. Rebecca Gomperts was born and raised in the Netherlands and was training to be a doctor in Amsterdam. Guinea was different.
Its extremes shocked her. She treated women suffering the consequences of botched . She watched women bleed out and die.
She rushed to help women who staggered into the hospital, hemorrhaging.So when given the chance, of course she wanted to learn how to perform safe terminations. Almost three decades later, what she remembers most about her training is how the French doctor instructed her—how he reached for a curette, a metal instrument that looks like a dollhouse teaspoon, and showed her how to use it to scrape the uterus of tissue.No textbook. No manual.
Just a woman and her doctors and a centuries-old tool. This was not medicine to be practiced at a bloodless remove. This took guts.The doctor picked up the curette and inserted it.
He scraped. Then she did. How would she know when she was finished? Whether it was working? Gomperts is a fast talker, but she slows down here.
He told her: “This is the feeling.”In the whir of that hospital, she realized the stakes of her chosen career. Rebecca Gomperts, MD, PhD, is now one of the limited few providers of medication in almost two dozen states in America. Her mandate is for whomever wants it, wherever.
What a mistake it had been for pro-choice activists to frame an act of basic health care as some rare occurrence or horrible last resort, she thought. The movement should have been frank. Bolder.
Or as Gomperts puts it: “We should just have said, ‘No, it’s not difficult. It’s just a decision we make as women. Fuck off.