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Showing posts from June, 2011

LA Doula

Until I started working with abortion, I never knew exactly how to articulate what I love about birth—what pulls me to keep these crazy hours, spend 36 hours straight in a hospital, stay surgically attached to my phone.I pursued a doula career for several years, but when people asked about my motivation, I could only vaguely describe my very real, life-long fascination with pregnancy and birth.At the time I hadn’t yet connected it to my other very real, life-long fascination with abortion.Learning, talking, reading and thinking about both filled hundreds of fascinated hours throughout my life—usually in very different settings and conversations—and while I had become a doula with the intention of doing full-spectrum work, I never realized how naturally these seeming-opposites connected in my mind. Each doula comes to this work for a different reason.Our ideas about pregnancy, childbearing and childrearing, our interpretation of the process, our thoughts on how best to support women are