By Randall K. O’Bannon, Ph.D. NRL Director of Education & Research
If you saw and/or read about the abortion ship, the abortion bus, the abortion train, and the abortion drone, you probably thought you’d seen everything. But now… there is the “abortion robot.”
Yesterday, in Belfast, Northern Ireland, abortion “activists” (as the media likes to call them) put a packet of abortion pills on top of a miniature robot with a camera on top of a mobile tread base. Then, a technician, observing through the camera and remotely piloting the robot from Amsterdam, guided the robot a couple of feet over the sidewalk to a young woman who bent over, grabbed the packet off the robot, opened it and took the pills.
Abortion remains illegal in Northern Ireland, despite what happened last Friday to the south in the Republic of Ireland. But abortion activists smell blood and are boldly acting staged act of defiance to change the law.
Police, who presumably had prior notice of the event, seized the robot and took the woman away for questioning. However she was not arrested.
So what happened was a PR stunt, from beginning to end. In the past, when some of the same activists did something similar with abortion drones crossing a river, it wasn’t clear that these were active pills and/or that the woman taking the pills was really pregnant.
The robots, drones, buses, trains, and ships are part of a larger, long term campaign by groups like Women on Waves (WOW) and Women on Web to get abortion legalized in countries where there are currently protections for unborn children. It began with the “abortion ship” which was first sent off the coast of Ireland in 2001 and 2002.
To avoid prosecution a ship would anchor just outside of Irish waters. They would broadcast for women to come out to the boat and receive abortion pills. It garnered a great deal of press, but as far as is known, in this particular instance, no women actually did.
It was soon followed by abortion ship visits to Poland (2003), Portugal (2004), Spain and Ecuador (2008), Morocco (2012), Mexico, and Guatemala (2017).
Then there was an “abortion train” between Ireland and Northern Ireland in 2014.
An “abortion bus” followed in Ireland in 2015.
They tried shipping pills by drone from Germany to Poland in 2015 and then from Ireland to Northern Ireland in 2016.
Usually, WOW partnered with local groups seeking to overturn their country’s laws, but Women on Waves or Women on Web usually took the lead. Women on Web, connected to the same people who run Women on Waves, are the ones running the website “I need an abortion” where women can order abortion pills online.
The legal gimmick with the robot is supposed to be that the delivery of the abortion pills is not by anyone in Northern Ireland, but technically the robot operator back in the Netherlands. So either the action is not illegal or not prosecutable.
And Women on Waves’ too-clever-by-half response is, “Although the women in Northern Ireland would break the law if they were pregnant by taking the abortion pills, this is a matter of patient confidentiality and forcing the women to undergo a pregnancy test would be a severe violation of their human rights.” (emphasis added)
It is worth noting that in April the Belfast city council passed a resolution opposing the prosecution of women buying abortion pills off the Internet.
In a statement posted Wednesday to coincide with the following day’s abortion robot event, Women on Waves said
A few days ago Ireland voted to legalise abortion. Northern Ireland cannot continue to violate women’s rights.
The abortion robot will mark the different legal reality for Northern Irish women, who still have to rely on to rely on new technology, like telemedicine, drones and robots that use international legal loopholes to protect their rights.