This morning, I read a long New York Times article about a group that mails chemical abortion drugs all across the world.

Rebecca Gomperts began Women on Web to provide abortions in countries where most preborn babies are protected by the law. NYT hails Gomperts as a heroine for her abortion work, implying that she is saving thousands of desperate women from unsafe abortions.

According to the article: “Almost 40 percent of the world’s population lives in countries, primarily in Latin America, Africa, Asia and the Persian Gulf, where abortion is either banned or severely restricted. The World Health Organization estimated in 2008 that 21.6 million unsafe abortions took place that year worldwide, leading to about 47,000 deaths.”

Of course, they fail to mention that those abortions also took the lives of 21.6 million preborn babies.

Now, Gomperts’ motives seem good but they are extremely and dangerously misplaced (I talked about this in a previous blog). She seems to believe that her abortion work will help women and protect them from back-alley abortionists like Kermit Gosnell or desperate do-it-yourself attempts.

But her work and her motives seem quite ironic. First, she fails to acknowledge that an abortion involves two people, one of whom almost always ends up dead; and second, her work strikes me as similar to the unsafe abortions that she says she is trying to protect women from.

Her group mails RU-486 abortion drugs to women and instructs them by email about how to take the drugs. The group also counsels women to hide the abortion so that they won’t get in trouble with the law. No doctor’s visit, no connections to local medical staff  if something goes wrong.

When a woman emails, Gomperts said she tells them, “We cannot judge your situation over a distance, so we advise you to visit your doctor. This is the limitation of the service.”

Gomperts may mean to help women, but she is doing it by selling women a dangerous abortion procedure and then abandoning them to deal with the consequences alone.

Women don’t need more abortions. Our world, at 21.6 million per year, doesn’t need more abortions. I just hope Gomperts will come to realize that and redirect her efforts toward supporting both women and their babies, which is what our world really needs more of.