VALLETTA — Rights campaigners with Women on Waves affixed 15 black lockboxes containing abortion pills to sites across Malta this month, offering access to the medication in a country with the European Union's strictest abortion laws. Anyone who is less than nine weeks pregnant and in need of an abortion can send an email to obtain the location and codes to access the pills.

In the first eight days of the campaign, 16 women contacted the organisers. Abortion is permitted in Malta, a staunchly Catholic nation, only if a woman's life or health is in danger. The campaign prompted one anti-abortion group to say it would call on police to launch an investigation.

Rebecca Gomperts, a medical doctor who founded Women on Waves in 1999, said she had not heard anything from Maltese authorities regarding the campaign. She likened the initiative to organisations that mail abortion pills to women around the world. "The only thing that we did is to make sure that they're available there for women instead of having them wait for the mail," Gomperts said. She added, "It's just archaic, in that sense, compared with the rest of Europe. It's such a violation of women's rights that's still happening there."

In 2022, an American woman suffered an incomplete miscarriage while on holiday in Malta. Doctors said they could not carry out a potentially life-saving abortion, citing laws that barred the procedure under any circumstance. She was airlifted to Spain, where an abortion was carried out. In 2023, Maltese politicians voted to allow terminations when the mother's life was in danger, provided three doctors agree and all other possible treatment options have been exhausted. Abortion remains illegal under all other circumstances, including rape, incest and severe foetal abnormalities.

A woman was handed a suspended prison term for inducing her own abortion using pills. The court relied heavily on testimony of healthcare workers who treated her after she was admitted to hospital for heavy bleeding. The last known case of a woman in Malta ending up in prison for an abortion occurred in 1980.

Isabel Stabile, a doctor and co-founder of Doctors for Choice, said the recent conviction was the third known case of a woman being reported by doctors for abortion in Malta, and that the woman was given a suspended sentence but was nevertheless found guilty. "At the moment, I would call the situation in Malta dire, absolutely dire. So we're talking hundreds of women, basically two a day, having an abortion," Stabile said. She called on politicians to decriminalise abortion to protect women's health and allow them to seek care more easily after taking pills, and said sex education in schools is minimal and access to free contraceptives is scant.

A survey of attitudes carried out in 2021 and 2022 suggested the majority of post-secondary school students polled in Malta were pro-choice. "So there is hope for the future. This is going to change. The question is, how soon can we make it happen?" she said.