After completing her medical training, she worked for several years as a ship’s doctor on a Greenpeace vessel called the Rainbow Warrior II. During that time, she met a woman who had been raped by a man who was supposed to help her get an abortion. Gomperts also met an eighteen-year-old girl in South America who was trying to raise her three younger siblings. Gomperts said that the girl had recently lost her mother to a back-alley abortion.
