The Women on Waves ship heads to international waters to dispense the abortion pill to women in need.

The documentary Vessel begins starkly, with the reveal of a typed plea from a woman in Morocco in 2012. Her words are full of desperation: she needs to get an abortion but the procedure is illegal in her country. She is writing to an organization founded by Dutch OBGYN Dr. Rebecca Gomperts that helps women access the abortion pill in countries where abortion is illegal or extremely difficult to access.

Our first shot of Dr. Gomperts is of her racing down the stairs and outside into a loud, angry crowd of anti-abortion protesters in Morocco. They circle around her, screaming in her face, and pulling at her body. In the midst of it all, she administers and distributes paperwork that explains how women can get a hold of and take a pill that will most likely result in an abortion. It is this story—one of the desperation that illegal abortion causes and Dr. Gomperts’ tireless mission to help women access abortion in untested and unlikely ways—that is the center of this intense, emotional, and inspiring film.

Early on in the documentary, Dr. Gomperts explains how she began to think about how national laws are connected to geographical spaces. She wondered, “How could we create a space where the only permission a woman needs is her own?”

Taking inspiration from her time with Greenpeace, Gomperts realized that she could put a mobile women’s clinic on a Dutch ship, pick up women in international port, take them out into international waters and there administer the abortion pill to them. Since abortion is legal in the Netherlands, abortion is legal on any Dutch ship in international waters, which begin 12 miles out from shore. This procedure would not break any laws and women could get the medical help they were denied. And so, in 2000, the floating clinic Women on Waves (WOW) was born.