The Doula Project

The Doula Project has a lot to celebrate this year! Not only have we reached more clients than ever before, we have also reached a new crowd of supporters! Bringing together the arts and activism for one special night,The Doula Project 2013 Benefit on October 3 was filled with performances, art, and music, all in the name of celebrating our clients, donors, and doulas. The Doula Project has a lot to celebrate this year! Not only have we reached more clients than ever before, we have also reached a new crowd of supporters! Bringing together the arts and activism for one special night,The Doula Project 2013 Benefit on October 3 was filled with performances, art, and music, all in the name of celebrating our clients, donors, and doulas. Doula Project Founders, Lauren and Mary, kicked off the night's festivities with some highlights of the awesome work the doulas have done over the past 6 years, including reaching over 15,000 pregnant people in the NYC area. This got big ch...

Fundraising Party at Nomad 78 Second Avenue Wednesday, July 10th @ 6:30 PM Please support The Doula Project by joining us on Wednesday July 10 for cocktails, dinner, and inspired conversation at our 2013 Fundraising Party. Meet the founders of the Doula Project and get to know us personally as we continue to build our community of support, while enjoying a carefully constructed six-course Mediterranean-inspired dinner with unlimited wine. Then take home a gift bag of hand-selected items to remember what is sure to be a fantastic evening. The Doula Project is a privately funded organization, and the money raised by this event will go directly toward bringing doulas to action in our community. The Doula Project has currently worked with over 10,000 patients throughout the spectrum of pregnancy, and we have trained over 100 doulas in our five-year tenure. Your donation keeps this momentum going by funding the development and implementation of doula trainings, by supporting ...

Please join us for a night of festivities in honor of The Doula Project! ....and also the 30th Birthday Party of the Doula Project's Fearless Accountant Lauren White! Who has agreed to make this her birthday party on one condition! That it be a... Contra Dance! - (http://en.wikipedia.org/ wiki/Contra_dance) with The Ok Pals (http://www.joedepaolo.com/ projects.html). It's ok that you have NO IDEA what that is. It's also ok that you have secretly stolen off to Western Mass every fall to get your fix. This is a New England style line dance and you will learn Everything You Need to Know when you get here! The Contra Dance begins PROMPTLY at 8:30pm! The Flanks! (http://theflanks.com/) start off the evening at 8pm. They "play feel-good, sing-along, dirty country-folk... Behind their deceptive simplicity hides a bunch of very good musicians. Clever original songs, funny lyrics—swinging, bluesy top-shelf entertainment with...

I’m still fairly new to this whole reproductive rights scene as an advocate, not just a participant. In the past I’ve only been concerned with my own choices. Now I continually get to discuss other people’s journeys and their choices. As an activist and as a doula, I get to stand with these people. My own personal choices take a backseat, as I become absorbed in every one's rights, not just my own. I got to have my first in-depth birth control talk this week. A lovely woman, mother and wife went through a vacuum aspiration that she had kept private from her husband. She is primarily a Spanish speaker, but could see I am definitely (and unfortunately) not, so we were both patient with each other as we chatted in the recovery room. I asked why she wanted to start using birth control pills and if she felt like it would be easy implementing them into her daily routine. Pills were just what she was most familiar with though she had never used them before. I suggested she think ab...

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 su...

I didn’t realize that I had scheduled an abortion doula shift for the weekend of Mother’s Day until the night before my shift. At that point, I wasn’t sure what impact it would have on the women I’d be supporting, if any at all. But I was prepared to face any emotional surprises that might trigger the patients, whether they might come from those crappy Hallmark commercials that always end up playing on the television in the intake room, or from the sight of small children sitting with their parents in the larger waiting rooms. Even on a weekend that has nothing to do with parenting, patients are understandably emotional before, during, and after an abortion, and their feelings are complex and intricately intertwined -- relief with sorrow, gratefulness with regret, anxiety with impatience. These thoughts, coupled with exhaustion, hunger, and a deep desire to be at their own homes and in their own beds mean that, even under the best possible circumstances, these days can be hard o...

Spring is a deliciously manic season for me. I sit cross-legged on the sidewalk in front of a hospital in Queens, eyes closed and face tilted toward the sun: this is my process for shedding the callous of the previous months seasonal depression, which, despite my best efforts, I get, and then forget about, like clockwork every year. This is the first very warm day in a while. I don't want to move, for fear of ruining it, so I try to see everything through my closed lids. The sidewalk is empty and I'm shameless. Someone shoots me a brief and misguided sympathetic look while tossing change at me. In reality my eyes should be open: I'm supposed to be looking for someone I've never seen before, a client who would like me to attend, as a doula, the birth of her child . We've been put in touch through the adoption agency she is working with to find a family for her baby. I think that if she were to come and see me, sitting in the middle of the sidewalk, it might make a po...