On Being an Abortion Doula

“She was chit-chatty at first,” began full-spectrum doula Annie Robinson, describing one of her first clients. “She didn’t seem anxious, didn’t seem like she particularly had much to say. And then, the [abortion] procedure began and I stood beside her, holding her hand, and she went into this other zone. She turned to me and just started going back in time to when she was six years old, eight years old, just telling me these horrific stories of sexual violence—abuse that her body had been subject to. It was astounding to witness—to feel palpably how the body holds memory—holds trauma. It was profound and it was an honor to be there. When we’re seized by something that needs to be shared, it’s so crucial for someone to be there to receive it, because to share it is to let it go.”

Robinson is one of over 20 volunteers for The Doula Project, a New York City-based nonprofit organization. The organization was started in 2007 as a way to provide caregivers to women undergoing abortions. In the words of the project’s mission statement, their doulas offer “all of the benefits of what is typically known to be the territory of birth doulas: pain management and relaxation techniques, information and education about pregnancy, and above all, emotional support and empathy.”

In 2009, the project expanded to encompass birth-work as well, though the majority of their clients are still women terminating pregnancies.

I met with the 27-year-old Robinson to discuss her experiences in this role over the past two years.

I believe that when you’re going through something that’s morally and physically exhausting and confusing, it’s so important to be seen—to have your emotions and your physical being recognized and acknowledged...

Doula of death. The article paints her as a very sympathetic, compassionate figure, and that appears to be how she sees herself as well. However, where is the sympathy and compassion for the unborn child being chopped into pieces in the womb? While she describes herself as "pro-choice," she seems to acknowledge the fact that there is "loss" as illustrated in this question:

How does the abortion doula role compare to being a birth doula?

There are different emotional textures that you encounter in these rooms. I think also the aftermath is different. One of the things that really draws me to this work is that I’m really interested in loss and grief, and that’s what’s happening here. Even if the grief is celebratory, it still is grief and it still is loss. There’s something lost with birth too—loss of pregnancy, loss of the in-utero experience.

I had some devastating losses as a very young child and ongoing through life—mostly the deaths of people very close to me. I’ve grown from my exploration of what it is to lose and to understand that life is all about loss. How can we embrace that? How can that be something that shapes us, and colors us, and gives us substance by appreciating what it is that absence offers? I’ve never had an abortion. I have never experienced that loss, but I think there are overarching themes of the loss experience that are communicable.

The difference is that this "loss" and "grief" is not something that happens from a loss from a natural death, but these feelings come from these women as they deliberately end the lives of their unborn children.

She says she was raised by a liberal feminist, so it's no surprise that she's involved in abortion work.

There is just so much screwed up moral relativism and mushy-brained pseudo-religious babble going on there.

Everyone mentioned in that story is a deeply disturbed, deeply flawed, nearly inhuman wreck. The only things missing from that story are a handful of shrooms and a heartfelt, colorful, emotional story describing the spiritual growth of the death doula and her abortion barbie as they roast marshmallows over the “medical waste”.

Dear God how much pure evil we do embrace.

icked people in active denial.

tells us that it’s just tissue, abortion is just like removing a tumor or diseased organ,

yet then talk about loss and are pissed when a sex-selected abortion is done.

if it ain’t a person/baby, why the loss? why cry over a piece of tissue removed? i would not cry over a tumor being removed.

these people know what they are doing yet deny it to us who tell them it’s murder. lying sick murdering bastards.

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