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 e-mail to obtain the location and codes to access the pills.
In the first 8 days of the campaign, 16 women were in touch, hinting at an unmet demand for the procedure in Malta, said Rebecca Gomperts of Women on Waves, the Netherlands-based charity behind the campaign.
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.
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.
We look forward to further reports! Meanwhile, it seems WoW may be very busy refilling the little black boxes!
SOURCE: The Guardian, by Ashifa Kassam, European community affairs correspondent. 27 April 2026. Photograph (part) by Kevin Schembri Orland/AP, taken in June 2022, from the Guardian.