THE LONG FIVE MINUTES: ABORTION DOULAS BRING COMFORT DURING A DIFFICULT TIME
Volunteers offer pregnant women a helping hand through the stress of termination, writes Monica Hesse
O YOU support reproductive choices of all shapes and sizes?” the flier read. “Become an abortion doula.”
More than 50 women saw the flier on Facebook or Twitter in April and responded, not entirely sure what an abortion doula was. Twenty-five were selected for weekend training and now, one Saturday morning in May, they will see whether they were right for the work.
A doula, traditionally, was trained to support a pregnant woman through delivery, a facilitator from the group Doulas for Choice said. They weren’t medical professionals, but could hold hands, offer distraction and supply heating pads. In a room of doctors and nurses focusing on the delivery of a healthy baby, a doula was focused solely on the emotional well-being of the mother.
DC Doulas, a volunteer-based collective, believed pregnant women needed as much support if they decided not to become mothers, the facilitator explained. And so, if the aspiring doulas in this room made it through training, then this is what they were signing up for: To be in a surgical room with a woman through one of the most intimate emotional experiences of her life, to hold her hand while she had an abortion.
The facilitator asked everyone to share strengths they could bring to the table, and hang-ups they’d try to leave at the door. Bringing: openness, empathy and willingness to learn, said the aspiring doulas. Leaving: nerves, distraction and preoccupation with their own lives. “Family judgement,” said a trainee doula named Grace. “My mother told me she would disown me if I had an abortion.” But she was here anyway.
The women the new doulas helped would be strangers, the facilitators explained. The doulas would know them only by their first names. After they left, the doulas would never see them again.
Outside the clinic, abortion was vast and abstract. Inside, abortion was a five-minute procedure happening to real people. To be an abortion doula meant being a part of the pro-choice movement at its most personal, where philosophical debate fell away.
On the first day of training a doctor came in, a chic, funny woman who went through the procedure, passing around medical instruments: a tenaculum, metal dilators. On the second day, they went through a list of neutral phrases and topics for when they found themselves not knowing
LOVING CARE: Lila, an abortion doula, gets a blanket for a patient in the recovery room.
what to say: “It is almost finished.” “You’re so strong.” “Are you watching anything good on TV?”
Ask what patients were planning to have for dinner. They would not have eaten since the night before. Talk about their kids. Patients who already had kids loved talking about their kids.
“It feels a little vague,” worried a woman named Lila, as they went over their roles. The final activity was role-play; the trainers had written scenarios on index cards. “Grace, are you comfortable going first?” a facilitator named Lindsey asked, selecting a card for the young woman who had said she needed to leave behind family judgement.
Another trainer lay back in a chair meant to mimic a surgical table. “I’m freaked out,” the pretend patient told Grace. “The protesters outside are making me nervous. Are they here every day?”
“They’re here some days,” improvised Grace, who, like other women in this story, is not being identified by her full name because of the sensitivity of the topic. “Some days they’re not. What about them is making you nervous?”
“Will I have to walk past them on my way out?”
“If you’re worried about getting to your car,” Grace said, “we’ll make sure you don’t have to go out alone”.
After the final exercise, one of the trainers asked everyone to form a circle and close their eyes. “If something is making you nervous, if you are feeling that like being an abortion doula is not the right fit, then take a step forward now.”
A few people shifted and one started to raise her hand. But in the end, they all stayed.
A month later, a couple of days before her first shadow shift, Grace went to a coffee shop to meet Tahira, the experienced doula she’d been assigned to shadow.
“Do you have any questions?” Tahira asked. “Nervous about anything?”
Tahira had been volunteering with DC Doulas for several years, she told Grace, long enough to know that she was supposed to offer just two fingers for patients to squeeze instead of a hand, but also long enough to know when to bend that rule.
“Sometimes, what they need is just to hear that what they’re feeling is normal,” Tahira said. “And it probably is.”
Some women might cry, and that was normal. Some women might feel only relief, and that was normal. Some might feel guilty about their relief. Feel drowsy after anaesthesia. Feel woozy, in the patient lounge, while they sat with the other women who had just come out of their own procedures. Have cramps. Laugh. Normal, normal, normal.
“Sometimes women come who don’t believe in abortion,” Tahira told Grace. Women who felt it was immoral. But then these same women ended up at the clinic.
Grace’s first introduction to abortion, at least that she could remember, was at a Christian retreat. Someone had talked to the girls about how their virginity should be saved as a gift. Someone else showed pictures of dismembered foetuses and said women who had abortions always regretted them. Life was sacred.
When she grew up, she became a birth doula. She sat in rooms with women in labour, leading them through breathing exercises, hours on end, exhausted and exhilarated, watching as new life came into the world.
Earlier this spring when she’d learned she was pregnant, the timing wasn’t good, but it wasn’t horrible. She had a job and a boyfriend with whom she hoped she might have children one day.
They talked about it a lot, and she thought about it a lot while she visited her family in their conservative state, wondering whether her mother noticed that she seemed more tired than usual.
“If you ever have an abortion I’ll disown you,” her mother had said, but then Grace’s second introduction to abortion was the clinic where she and her boyfriend had decided, after weeks of conversation, to make an appointment. She put her feet in the stirrups, and she took long breaths as she looked up at the ceiling.
When it was over, her primary emotion wasn’t grief, she said, but assurance that she’d made the right decision. The clinic had been compassionate, her friends had been supportive, and when it was over she started to think about women who had to go through it alone.
She found herself googling “abortion doula”, a concept she was only vaguely familiar with. DC Doulas for Choice came up, and they had just posted a flier, and they were accepting applicants.
“We’re going to come up with a mission statement,” Lindsey, the facilitator, had said at training. A sentence-long definition of what this class of doulas wanted to represent.
“Non-judgemental,” someone called out, and Lindsey wrote it on the whiteboard. “Clientcentric,” suggested another. Lindsey wrote down everything, adding semicolons, transforming the suggestions into an unwieldy sentence. “Anything else?” she asked.
From the back of the room, Grace half-raised her hand. “A doula is water,” she said. “Explain that?” “Taking the shape of whatever role is needed,” Grace explained. “Like water.”
From the whiteboard, Lindsey nodded. “If someone getting an abortion calls it a baby, it’s a baby,” Lindsey said. “If she calls it a foetus, it’s a foetus. If she doesn’t say anything, don’t talk about it.”
She turned and wrote: “A doula is water.”