“It’s important that we all don’t have the same roles.”
An Interview with Zachi Brewster and Carly Manes,
co-facilitators of
Dopo’s Abortion Doula Training
By ACP Board Member Abby Minor
This month I’m talking with abortion doulas Zachi Brewster and Carly Manes, two of ACP’s newest Grant Partners. Together, Brewster and Manes have created and piloted a six-week online abortion doula training that’s already made big waves. The training takes place under the umbrella of Dopo—an inclusive community platform, created by Brewster, that aims to redefine what a successful abortion looks like by centering people and their emotional and physical care before, during and after an abortion.
Those who take part in Dopo’s abortion doula training can look forward to powerful self-reflection homework; access to a strong community of established and burgeoning abortion doulas; one-on-one coaching on developing a doula practice; and myriad, diverse examples of what it can look like to be a doula and support abortion.
Now that applications are open through Sept. 26th for Dopo’s second training cycle, I wanted to hear about what Brewster and Manes have already learned and what their hopes are for this next training.
You’re working with folks who may go on to do a variety of things with this training under their belts—can you talk about some of the ways you’re seeing people put the Dopo training into action?
ZB: A range of people applied to the first training this past spring—teachers, social workers, people who are already doulas, people who worked in varying capacities in reproductive justice roles or organizations. Some people had experienced abortion themselves and some hadn’t. We also had several art gallery directors, psychologists, and researchers who work on reproductive rights and justice. So people show up to the training with diverse experiences and goals; the course isn’t just for people who want to be abortion doulas in the way Carly and I are.
The ways people take the training back into their communities shows the diversity of what it means to support abortion.
What’s important and interesting is that there is not one single way that our training is being used in different countries and different settings. We do have people who are reaching out to clinics or who have already developed roles in clinics in their own communities, as well as those who have developed their own independent doula practices. But we’ve also worked, for example, with a teacher who wanted to be able to talk to students who were coming to her with abortion experiences. The ways people take the training back into their communities shows the diversity of what it means to support abortion. It’s important that we all don’t have the same roles.
CM: We’ve done a lot of one-on-one work with folks after the course—people trying to figure out what their role in supporting abortion could be. As Zachi said, some are reaching out to clinics, some are building social media platforms. We have a whole section in the course where we explore what kind of doula you want to be in your community and what kind of doula does your community need?
Has this diversity of ways that people wind up using the course changed how you’re approaching the training this fall?
ZB: We knew from the start that we didn’t want this to be an exclusive course—there is really something for everyone with an interest in expanding how they themselves view abortion and how they want to support abortions. We get a lot of questions, like: “I’m not sure I want to be a doula, I’m a teacher and my goal is to be able to reduce stigma around abortion in conversations with students—is this course for me?” The answer is always yes.
CM: Also, we’re really trying to integrate feedback from the last course. We’re working on doing a lot of pre-recorded content to make more room for conversation. Building community across 10 different time zones and sharing content over a 2-hour period each week is a challenge!
ZB: We don’t have all the answers and we make that very clear. We share experience, which is very valuable, but we welcome learning from people who join the course, some of whom have even taken other abortion doula trainings. We say, if anything this adds another tool to your kit but we really encourage folks to keep learning beyond us as well.
I’m wondering how your thinking about abortion stigma has changed over the course of your project—how has the way you’ve talked or thought about abortion changed?
ZB: It’s been very interesting for me, as much of my work as an abortion doula is working with people to tackle abortion stigma. Although I knew that a lot of what we would be talking about and teaching about in the training is tackling abortion stigma, for the first time I saw it intersecting with my work in a new way. The training really reminded me that abortion stigma is not just about abortion and how we need to widen our view and understanding of what abortion stigma is. The Reproductive Justice framework can help us to do that, and is the foundation and inspiration for this training.
Putting together this training—from the organizational side, to looking at compensation, even trying to find some sort of balance and diversity in the people who take our training— in all of these scenarios and more, we see how they connect with abortion stigma and wider RJ issues. A good example of this is how we charge for the course and how that allows people to enter into this space, or could stop people from entering into this space. Economic justice is linked to reproductive justice and that is linked to abortion stigma.
CM: Yes, for example we just had someone who requested a reduced course fee because their parents are supporting them right now and they can’t ask their parents to support this form of education. So, everywhere in this course we learn that abortion stigma goes beyond just the procedure—it goes into how people think about spending their money, how they think about how they spend their time, how they talk about what their hobbies are.
ZB: I also think about how one of the big pieces of feedback from the spring cycle is that we were asked to expand upon self-care in this work, largely because of abortion stigma. Because people don’t always have a place they can go to reflect with someone about their experience of taking part in the training or their work developing their practice. In addition to this some people also had to check in with us on what platforms we were using to run the training on to ensure that their safety in their community or country was not compromised. We’re committed to building this community of people who do this work so they can receive community care and self-care, because they may not be able to receive that in their lives—whilst prioritizing their safety as best we can.
A lot of folks who come to our course have thought a lot about abortions, have had abortions, have done values explorations in the past—and we still need 5 hours to do that exploration because our own internal abortion stigma is always evolving in relation to things that are happening in the world and your community.
CM: On the first day of the course we do a values exploration. A lot of folks who come to our course have thought a lot about abortions, have had abortions, have done values explorations in the past—and we still need 5 hours to do that exploration because our own internal abortion stigma is always evolving in relation to things that are happening in the world and your community. So I’ve come to understand that abortion stigma can evolve, fade, come back, and so on.
What are some of the things that happen in a typical 2-hour weekly session?
CM: We always do a community welcoming. Zachi and I both have a deep passion for eating and love food dearly, so we always welcome folks in with a song and share something lovely we ate that week. We ask folks if there’s anything they’ve been thinking about that they want to share with the group. In one course we talk about what actually is an abortion—with medication, with an in-clinic procedure, with herbs. Another course looks at what is an abortion doula—in a clinic setting, in a context that is legally restrictive, in a setting that is not legally restrictive. We talk a lot about what is the role of a doula and what is not.
Additionally, there’s always an interactive piece, we do breakout sessions. And we always close out with a deeper learning—folks get deeper learning prompts and have a Google doc where they are always responding to the deeper learning prompts.
And—also, a lot of magical things happen
that I feel like I can’t put words to.
Z: We really respect people’s time, but sometimes we do allow an extra half hour for extra conversation, because people do want to share and reflect together. Hence why we’re changing the way we facilitate the training this time around so there is more time for conversation. We try to find the balance between, for example, participants listening to us or guest facilitators and having rooms where participants can talk just to each other. We’re focused on building a community of learning but also a community that can continue to be supportive and a source of resources after.
Is there anything you want to say that we haven’t talked about yet?
CM: A couple things feel really important that have continually come up. The first thing is, it’s really hard to run this course according to our values and also in the structure of capitalism. For example, someone has reached out to us who doesn’t speak English fluently and—translation and interpreting content and live speech costs money. 55% of people who’ve applied for the fall training so far have asked for financial support, and we are very committed to providing this course without money being a barrier. At the same time, it’s important that we compensate our speakers and ourselves. So we’re continually trying to evolve our practice to meet our values.
The second thing is, we are very aware of the fact that we are two folks based in western countries—me in the U.S., Zachi is based in Italy but works also in a UK context and with folks mostly in western Europe. So we are missing grounding in the reality of what abortion is like in east Asia, South Asia, throughout Africa and all throughout South America. We try to be upfront about that even though we have folks join from all those places. We are figuring out what it means to make ourselves accessible to all folks at the same time knowing that we carry our particular experiences.
Part of what we’ve come to is the reality that we’re not going to be the right course for everyone and that’s okay. We want to help others develop their own content and curriculum for the communities in which they’re based, and we also work with others to make our content as accessible as we can to people all over the world.
ZB: We are constantly changing and evolving. We’re just constantly doing our best with the tools and information we have now, but with the viewpoint that it will be different every time. So as much as we are teaching this as a training, we are also learning—from situations, from experience, and also from the people who choose to journey with us in the 6 weeks and beyond.
Learn more about DOPO’s second virtual abortion
doula training course and apply here!
This is the third post in ACP’s 2021 blog series featuring conversations with recent grant partners. We started this series in order to highlight some of the many questions, tensions, and insights that animate the complex work of destigmatizing abortion. We also launched this series for the simple reason that here at ACP, we’re always up for abortion conversations! If you are, too, please join the conversation in the Comments below.