What Ever Happened to All the Abortion Boats?
What Ever Happened to All the Abortion Boats?
A look back at the ambitious—and outlandish—ideas to connect people with in-person abortion care after Dobbs.
In one of the most bizarre stories from the immediate aftermath of the Supreme Court’s decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, a man named Michael Kimbro launched an organization called Abort Offshore and claimed that he was providing abortion care on a boat in the Gulf of Mexico.
After the Dobbs decision leaked to the public, lots of people put forward ideas for how the federal government could circumvent state-level abortion restrictions by allowing abortions to be provided on federal land like national parks. So in and of itself, the idea of using federal waters wasn’t too wild.
But it turned out that Kimbro was a serial scammer with a string of past arrests and lawsuits filed against him for fraud. Abort Offshore was almost certainly a hoax.
But his wasn’t the only… shall we say… ambitious idea to provide in-person abortion care to people from ban states post-Dobbs.
For example, back in 2022 I reported for Cosmopolitan on Abortion Delivered, a real initiative to bring mobile abortion clinics to the border areas of Colorado.
And this week, I checked in on where these and other efforts stand two years later. Read the story here.
Come for the weird hoax, stay for the actual abortion planes.
