Rights campaigners have affixed lockboxes containing abortion pills to sites across Malta, in a campaign designed to highlight the country’s near-total ban on abortion.

The 15 black boxes aim to provide practical help to women grappling with the EU’s strictest abortion laws; anyone who is less than nine weeks pregnant and in need of an abortion is invited to send an email to obtain the location and codes to access the pills.

In the first eight days of the campaign, 16 women were in touch, hinting at an unmet demand for the procedure in the southern European country, said Rebecca Gomperts of Women on Waves, the Netherlands-based charity behind the campaign.

“It’s just archaic, in that sense, compared with the rest of Europe,” she said. “It’s such a violation of women’s rights that’s still happening there.”

The campaign flies in the face of the law, as abortion is only permitted in the staunchly Catholic nation if a woman’s life or health is in danger. The lockbox campaign has stirred debate across the country and prompted one anti-abortion group to tell local media that it would call on police to launch an investigation.

Gomperts, a medical doctor who founded Women on Waves in 1999, said she had yet to hear anything from Maltese authorities. But she likened the campaign to the 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,” she said.

Malta’s strict laws were thrust into the international spotlight in 2022 after an American suffered an incomplete miscarriage while on holiday in the EU country. Doctors said they could not carry out a potentially life-saving abortion, citing laws that, at the time, barred the procedure under any circumstance. She was eventually airlifted to Spain where an abortion was carried out.

The case led politicians in Malta to tinker with the law, voting in 2023 to allow terminations when the mother’s life was in danger, as long as it was agreed to by three doctors and if all other possible treatment options had been exhausted. Abortion, however, remains illegal under all other circumstances, including rape, incest and severe foetal abnormalities, making Malta an outlier in western Europe.

Data collected by Doctors for Choice Malta indicates that many women are being forced to choose between complying with the law and their right to decide. In 2025, two of the main online providers of abortion pills shipped 667 packages to Malta, up nearly 12% from one year earlier, the organisation said.

Isabel Stabile, a doctor and a co-founder of Doctors for Choice, said: “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.”

Other women travel abroad, spending thousands of euros to access the procedure at clinics across Europe.

The risk that women in Malta face was underlined last month, after a woman was handed a suspended prison term for inducing her own abortion using pills. While she did not formally admit to the charges, she was found guilty after the court reportedly relied heavily on the testimony of healthcare workers who treated her after she was admitted to hospital for heavy bleeding.

While the last known case of a woman in Malta ending up in prison for an abortion is believed to have occurred in 1980, Stabile described it as the third case in which a woman was known to have been reported by doctors.

In this case, she had been “given a suspended sentence, but nevertheless found guilty,” said Stabile. “What sense does it make to put women through all of this torture of prosecution and then a court case? It’s expensive, of course, because you need to pay your lawyer.”

Instead, she called on politicians to take the “simplest, safest, first baby step” towards protecting women’s health: decriminalising abortion for women. Doing so would allow them to seek care more easily if needed after taking pills, she said.

The lack of choice for women in Malta was exacerbated by the country’s minimal level of sex education in schools and scant access to free contraceptives, said Stabile. “We are making it exceedingly difficult for women to protect themselves and at the same time we’re saying: ‘Oh well, if you get pregnant, that was God’s will, wasn’t it? So get on and be a good lady and deliver this baby.’ It doesn’t really make any sense.”

She remained optimistic, however, that things would eventually change, citing a survey of attitudes carried out in 2021 and 2022 that 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,” Stabile said. “The question is, how soon can we make it happen?”