Charon’s Boat

SAN FRANCISCO (ChurchMilitant.com) – An OB-GYN doctor initiated a plan to help women get access to abortion regardless of their state’s legislation.

Meg Autry

Meg Autry, a California doctor, proposes a floating abortion clinic be put in the Gulf of Mexico to help pregnant women in southern states easily get abortions.

“There’s been an assault on reproductive rights in our country, and I’m a lifelong advocate for reproductive health and choice,” Autry said of the plan. “We have to create options and be thoughtful and creative to help people in restrictive states get the health care they deserve.”

Autry proposed naming the ship “the PRROWESS,” which stands for Protecting Reproductive Rights of Women Endangered by State Statutes.

“PRROWESS aims to be a floating health clinic dedicated to offering a full scope of reproductive health and wellness services, including contraception and surgical abortion,” Autry’s website states.

Autry, a professor at the University of California, San Francisco, would offer abortions through 14 weeks of gestation, contraceptives, treatment for sexually transmitted infections, vaccinations and more.

Skirting State Law

The proposed plan would establish the clinic in federal waters, so state laws banning abortions would not apply.

To successfully skirt pro-life legislation in Louisiana, Alabama, Texas and Mississippi, the buoyant abortuary will have to be strategically placed in the Gulf.

The ship must be at least nine miles off the coast of Texas and at least three miles away from Alabama, Louisiana and Mississippi’s coasts.

In 2001, a similar idea was carried out in Ireland. A converted fishing boat was anchored 12 miles off the coast to be located in international waters.

The ship was registered in the Netherlands, so it could adhere to Dutch law, which allowed abortions to be performed.

Freebies From Fundraising?

Backers of the project are currently fundraising. Autry, who boasted abortion is her “life’s work,” told ABC she is seeking to raise $20 million to start the business and believes the project could be up and running in the next 12 months.

Autry hopes to provide abortions cheaply if enough donations are raised. “The project is being funded with philanthropy, and the patients’ care is on a needs basis, so most individuals will pay little to nothing for services,” the California professor explained.

She complained, “Wealthy people in our country are always going to have access, so once again, it’s a time now where [the] poor, people of color, marginalized individuals, are gonna suffer — and by suffering I mean, like, lives lost.”

Anticipating legal battles, Autry communicated to NBC the PRROWESS project is planning to hire lawyers.

Killing With Pills

Other leftists have been scrambling for ways to encourage women to get abortions.

Protestors who gathered outside the Supreme Court the day after the Dobbs v. Jackson decision carried signs advertising nontraditional ways of aborting children.

One sign encouraged pregnant mothers to take excessive amounts of misoprostol and mifepristone. Misoprostol is a prescription drug used typically used to treat stomach ulcers, but when taken with the abortion-inducing mifepristone, expectant mothers can self-administer abortion.

Since the drugs are federally approved, the federal government claims, they provide a loophole for women to carry out abortions even if they live in states that have outlawed abortive medication.

United States Attorney General Merrick Garland cited the Food & Drug Administration, claiming, “States may not ban mifepristone based on disagreement with the FDA’s expert judgment about its safety and efficacy.”

However, pregnant women in pro-life states may have trouble getting the abortive pills prescribed and try to obtain them illegally.

Pro-abortion telehealth companies that ship such medication may face legal challenges if they subvert state law when mailing the abortive pills.

As Church Militant previously reported, in January 2021 the Supreme Court ruled abortive medication must be dispensed in person. Previously, because of COVID lockdowns, telehealth companies had been able to ship abortion-inducing medication.

Pro-abortion advocates are vocal about ways to break the law. One article by Chron, a media company based in Texas, where abortive medication is banned, informed its readers “a person living in Texas could order the pills online from a provider outside of the U.S. and have the pills mailed to their home in an unmarked package. Patients might also have friends or family mail the medication from a state where it is lawful.”

Pro-life advocates have hammered for years against the use of abortive medication. In 2018, Brooke Paz, a Students for Life Action government affairs coordinator, told Church Militant:

We know chemical abortion pills are dangerous to women’s health, their fertility and their lives. And sending these deadly pills through the mail without any pre-screening or follow-up care is convenient and cost-effective for corporate abortion, but women will and have paid the price as will countless preborn infants.

Data published by the FDA in 2020 suggest mifepristone may not be safe. By the end of June 2021, at least 26 women have died after taking the drug.