On International Women’s Day, I gathered with red-clad women on the steps of the Port Townsend post office, where our collective dreams and struggles wrapped around the world, having just arrived home from Guatemala after working with Women on Waves (WOW).

WOW is a Dutch-based organization that provides women’s reproductive health services aboard an Austrian ship in international waters, thus falling under Austrian law. (Read: We broke no laws and were detained illegally.)

Regarding ethnocentricity and cultural consultation, WOW only sails to countries where they have been invited by local women’s rights advocates. In Guatemala, we worked with local doctors on call to provide legal after-care services (if necessary), local lawyers who managed overall strategy and legal proceedings (and called out corruption, urging us to leave before we were jailed), and local women’s organizations who implored us to offer access to safe and legal abortion denied to women in their country.

But we could never help the 65,000 women that would otherwise get an unsafe, underground abortion that year. We were always more than the services we came to provide.

We were there to bring the conversation to the TVs and newspapers, dinner tables, the court bench, the parliament offices, and the desk of the president, Jimmy Morales.

We were there to highlight the issue that Guatemalan women’s organizations have been working on for years and will continue to work on until women can make their own life and medical choices. One lawyer hoped this campaign would lead to exceptions for abortion in cases of rape and incest, and in 10 years, possibly to the choice of the woman.

It’s a borderless battle – the global fight for women’s rights, and it was an honor to join forces with international women (and our male allies) and be bold for change.

MERILEE NYLAND EVANS

Port Townsend