Talking to an Abortion Doula

By jia.tolentino March 28, 2014

The Atlantic talked to 27-year-old doula Annie Robinson, who volunteers for the Doula Project, which was founded in 2007 to provide caregivers to women undergoing abortions and has since expanded, although “the majority of their clients are still women terminating pregnancies.” I was fascinated by this part:

How do your clients react to your presence?

Sometimes I’ll encounter clients who are incredibly emotional and incredibly forthcoming. Others are just silent and shut down and in their box — going through the motions… Of the seven I was with yesterday, five of them were not really interested in connecting. They don’t want to make eye contact. They’re resistant to my offered hand.

They’re not interested in communication, so it challenges me to get creative as to how I can provide compassionate care to someone who is seemingly not wanting to receive it. I believe, nonetheless, that they’re still being affected by my presence, even on an unconscious level.

Why do you think they don’t want compassion?

It’s not that they don’t want the compassion, they just don’t want connection. They just don’t want to be anchored in this moment, perhaps because it’s too much. It gets too real, or it gets too painful. We all have moments in life where we just don’t want to acknowledge where we are right now. To connect with somebody, and to receive what somebody is offering brings you quickly into the present moment, and sometimes people just want to avoid that. And, that’s okay. That’s their way of coping.

Robinson seems like an awesome woman, generally:

Could you have turned out differently?

I was born in Louisiana. My biological family is all there, but I was adopted by a couple who lives in Chicago — a very liberal couple. My life could’ve gone such a different way. I could’ve been raised in a small town in Louisiana with very conservative viewpoints and been deeply involved in the Catholic Church. Who knows?