At Abortion Conversation Projects, your donation goes right into the hands of artists and activists. At ACP, we bring together individuals and groups around the globe to combat abortion stigma in their communities by funding their ideas and projects. Our grant partners work at the grassroots level, starting with intimate and powerful conversations to work towards lasting social change.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The Abortion Conversation Projects (ACP) has chosen nine new projects that are experimenting with strategies to address the stigma surrounding abortion. ”At the same time abortion access is under attack in the US and in other countries we are amazed that there are so many people finding creative ways to challenge the stigma that fuels anti-abortion policies,” says Peg Johnston, Chair of ACP. The organization has now funded 82 Projects and offers support and expertise to both Grant Partners and applicants.
Three of the new grantees are working in countries where abortion is illegal or severely restricted and greatly stigmatized. Manodiversa works with LGBT and non-binary people in Bolivia and has found a great deal of intersectionality with abortion access. They will produce a booklet of first person stories that will increase awareness not only in Bolivia but will be distributed thoughout Latin America. Beyond Stigma will bring values clarification tools to a group of social workers and health care workers in Kenya and help them understand the reality of people seeking abortion. Also in Kenya, Colors of My Dignity will use trained “influencers” on What’s App to educate followers about the facts of abortion and to counteract the prevalent stigma about abortion.
Dopo Doula Training has already completed a successful international 6 week course to train doulas who help women through reproductive experiences including abortion. Zachi Brewster and Carly Manes expect to train another cohort in the Fall and offer discounts to those who need them. Abortion: My Body, My Sacred Decision is a project of Soul2Soul which supports Black Womxn through the full spectrum of reproductive experiences in the Denver Metro area. They have a variety of weekly support groups that empower women and give them a safe space to discuss their experiences.
Found (abortion) Monument has an installation at Unison Art Center, New Paltz, NY, as part of the land-based exhibition “Owning Earth.” Their installation is a meadow with naturally growing abortifacient plants and they are educating the public about the ancient history of women trying to control their fertility. So I Had an Abortion is an ongoing project in Canada that engages people through workshops and storytelling in English and Spanish in mutually beneficial ways.
Two existing Grant Partners received further funding. The North Dakota WIN Fund Book Club will continue reading books about abortion and discussing abortion stigma. They have been tracking results of how book discussions shift stigma and hope to collect further data. Lena Hann, who previously produced a Fetal Tissue Viewing Guide for clinics, will now produce accurate photos of fetal development for both patients and staff.
The Abortion Conversation Projects is committed to eliminating the stigma of abortion by supporting individuals and small groups engaged in innovative community-based projects that create new ways and opportunities to talk about abortion honestly and publicly. It has awarded 82 Grant Partnerships since the program started in 2012. ACP fundraises approximately $12,000 each year to pay for seed grants and expenses. The ACP Board also offers consultations with people working on abortion stigma. For more information and to join the mailing list, consult ACP’s website at www.AbortionConversationProjects.org or the Facebook page
ACP’s new cycle of grant applications is now open, with a deadline of May 15th and we hope to hear from lots of different people about how they want to challenge the stigma surrounding abortion. At a recent board meeting, we discussed what kinds of things we were looking for in a grant application. Our answers were varied, and to be honest, sometimes subjective, but we want to share these with people who want to apply.
One feature that ACP offers is a connection with our Grant Partners to provide whatever expertise, encouragement, or resources that we can. So, we also want to evaluate our own interests, skills, and capacity to offer helpful assistance to a project. For instance, one of our board members had experience in community murals and we knew we could help others who wanted to paint murals.
Having funded 73 projects so far, we are also interested in what strategies will generate conversations that lead to shifting attitudes about abortion. Does the proposed strategy align with ours? In other words, does it promote conversation, preferably on a one-to-one basis in a community setting? Do proposals offer a new innovative strategy to get people talking? Or does the proposal take a proven strategy to a new audience? An example from a recent project is establishing a book club that reaches into a rural state. There is ample evidence that in the discussion of books, people can shift their opinions as others share their experiences.
ACP Board members also look at the more usual stuff:
Is the budget realistic? Is the amount ACP can offer just a small part of the entire budget? If so, how will you get the rest or, how will an association with ACP help you achieve their goal?
Is the project viable? Do we think this can actually be done in the time specified, with the people involved and with the proposed budget?
Are there impediments to success because of technology? Does the project use current cutting edge technology to reach an audience?
Do we think the organization has the ability to follow through on the project and provide us with the required documentation and financial receipts? Do we have a way to easily re-imburse through check or PayPal?
How will you determine the success of the project? ACP encourages innovative as well as traditional ways of evaluating a project. We have found that considering this question in your initial planning makes evaluating your project straight forward. More information, including a webinar here.
DEADLINE MAY 15TH APPLY HERE
A conversation between Abbe Tanenbaum, author of the play Committed Citizen, and Abby Minor, ACP Board Member
This is the first post in ACP’s new 2021 blog series featuring conversations with recent grant partners. We started this series, which is facilitated by ACP Board Member Abby Minor, 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!
At the end of January I had a chance to talk with one of ACP’s most recent grant partners, Abbe Tanenbaum. Abbe received a 2020 ACP grant to produce Committed Citizen, a play she wrote after she came across a set of powerful letters written decades ago by women seeking abortions. The play, which explores the relationship between an eccentric older feminist activist and the young actress she hires to clean up her wildly disorganized apartment, was sparked by Abbe’s own experiences. Committed Citizen, which enjoyed a digital performance on September 13th, 2020, reflects on intergenerational feminism and the legacy of older feminisms.
I talked with Abbe, who lives in Northern Ireland, from my home in Pennsylvania. We had a long trans-Atlantic conversation over Zoom, touching on subjects such as being an artist, the different ways people come to abortion destigmatizing work, and why we love hearing abortion stories. Below is an edited transcript of our conversation.
AM: How did the work of addressing abortion stigma come into your life?
AT: My play, Committed Citizen, is based on real-life letters written by women seeking abortions in the 1970s. These letters, which came from all over the east coast, came into my life through someone I met while I was living in New York, pursuing a career as an actress and working as a personal organizer. One of my clients had worked as a counselor at an underground clinic in the 70s. This person had been very involved in the feminist movement, and she sparked my interest—in many ways she showed me different ways of thinking. She would mention a name, like Flo Kennedy, and that would launch me into research and reading—so I was learning through conversations. And then when she showed me these letters, they stayed in my mind. They stuck with me and eventually propelled me into writing this play. They gave me permission to move from being an interpretive artist to being a creative artist—they launched me from being an actress to a playwright.
AM: So for you, the work of destigmatizing abortion and coming into your identity as a playwright have been synonymous. I wonder if the way you’ve talked or thought about abortion has changed over the course of this project?
AT: I’ve always been pro-choice, but doing the research has helped me to be more specific as to why—I’ve become better at defending my position. Initially I would shy away from telling people this was a play about abortion—but I realized I wanted to try to normalize it even in the tiniest way that I could. So I try to talk about abortion in a way that’s normal, in everyday conversation—like how I talk about what I had for lunch, or my period. Even if it makes other people feel uncomfortable, I’m learning not to project that discomfort back to them. Even if I myself am feeling uncomfortable, I try not to project that. I’m going to fake it until I don’t have to fake it anymore!
“I realized I wanted to try to normalize it
even in the tiniest way that I could.”
AM: I get that! I was writing a book about abortion for years, and I often struggled when people asked me what I was writing about. Do I tell them? Do I not tell them? Sometimes I felt bad for not being more comfortable, even after years of doing this work. But I like what you’re saying—we aren’t always going to feel totally at ease, for obvious reasons. We might have to fake it, and that’s okay—even if we’re faking it, projecting comfort around abortion itself is a form of destigmatizing. That’s work we are doing, even in just one small exchange. I’m also wondering, aside from conversations about the play, how did you approach talking about abortion within the play? What kind of research did you do to figure out how you wanted to talk about abortion?
AT: I sought out documentation of people talking about abortion in the most private way they could—so, not public testaments, but videos where people are just talking to the camera, in public solitude. I read books like The Choices We Made and Judith Arcana’s Hello. This is Jane. I also did research to help me understand New York City in the 70s and the contours of the feminist movment at that time, including the role of Black women in the feminist movement. I read Assata Shakur’s Assata: An Autobiography, Ain’t I a Woman by bell hooks, and Abortion Rap, which documents the NYC trial that tried to nullify the state’s 1828 abortion law. That trial was one of the first that actually allowed women who had abortions to be expert witnesses as opposed to just doctors and nuns. Flo Kennedy was one of the lawyers, so I also read her autobiography, Color Me Flo. Once you start talking about abortion people start sending you articles. And at one point there had been a part in the play that took place on an anti-abortion picket line, so I also read anti-choice blogs. I wanted to know, how do these people talk about their perspectives?
AM: Can you tell me about a moment you felt really proud of your work during this project?
AT: I felt really proud when I was Venmo-ing all the participants their payment, when I was paying all the actors and artists who worked on it with me. I felt really proud I could create that space with them, especially during COVID. It felt good to say, ‘your art and your voice were important.’ So often artists are asked to do things for free—it felt really great to be able to do that for them, thanks to the grant from ACP.
AM: If you could wave a magic wand, what’s one aspect of normative abortion conversations or rhetoric you’d change? Is there a word or concept associated with abortion you’d delete from the conversation if you could?
AT: Hmm, I think—I think what I most hate is blame. I hate things like, ‘you put yourself in this mess.’ I would love for abortion to be treated with more compassion. We all are on our own journey, and if that’s not part of yours, then that’s not part of yours. It doesn’t have to be inherently positive or negative. It just is. I would definitely get rid of the notion that there is some ‘kind of person’ who has an abortion. Any person with a uterus can have an abortion.
AM: Could you talk about something that felt like an important discovery for you, in terms of talking about abortion and stigma?
AT: A big discovery for me was realizing that part of the stigma busting was how I was interacting with people who might not even see the show. It was not just that I got this money and got to put on the show, but that it was an opportunity for me to talk to people I wouldn’t normally talk to about abortion. It gave me a platform for that. I got the opportunity to make the conscious choice that I wasn’t going to shy away from discomfort or conflict. I still have those moments when someone asks me what the play is about and I ask myself, are you going to really tell them? more often now I tell them.
I’ve also discovered that I love hearing people’s abortion stories. It cuts through the shit so fast. It cuts through the small talk.
AM: That’s so true. It sounds like you’ve spent a lot of time sitting with other people’s stories. I’m wondering—forgive me if this is too forward—but do you have your own experience with abortion? I’m just curious, because so many people come to this work from their own experience, and it sounds like perhaps it was others’ experiences, in the form of these letters, that really led you into this. That’s interesting to me.
AT: I don’t have a personal experience with abortion, and that’s something I sometimes feel self-conscious about. Often when I tell people about my play, they wind up sharing their own story with me, and it’s such a powerful thing to be trusted with. Sometimes I wish I could trust them with something as equally vulnerable and important.
AM: Well as someone who’s on the other side of that exchange sometimes, I can honestly say that the biggest gift someone can give me when I tell them about my experience is the gift of showing me they are totally okay with abortion! Like, way more than whether you have had an abortion, I am looking to see if you are deeply supportive. And I think you are making that very clear with all the work you are doing. Unfortunately there is sometimes this ‘team’ rhetoric with different reproductive experiences—people who have this experience vs. this experience. The truth is, there are a lot of different experiences you can have with a uterus, and we all have some combination of those. The most important thing, it seems to me, is honoring all those experiences, and trying to make each one as dignified as possible for each other. On that note, I wonder how you would you describe your ideal abortion conversation? What would that look like?
AT: First of all, I would definitely want somebody there that understands the language around it. I wouldn’t want to be the monitor, I would want people who have facilitated these conversations a hundred times to do it. What I love is when people—and it happened after the digital reading of the play—I love it when people feel like they can share their abortion story. I love creating a space where people feel comfortable to do that. That is the beginning. if you’re unable to talk about it, that means there is probably some shame at play. And by creating a space where people can share, we can reinforce the fact that it’s not shameful. To be able to create that space for people who maybe are carrying a little of that cultural shame, which is so understandable, maybe this can be a step in the direction of letting that go. No one feels bad for having their appendix taken out. So I think the ideal conversation, for me, is one that’s happening at all! Just to create the conditions for the conversation, that’s my goal.
AM: Yes, right--like, it’s hard to go speak our stories in front of elected officials, or petition to change the way abortion is represented at a cultural level, if we aren’t even able to tell our own stories in a safe space with trusted listeners. I have often seen folks want to jump to those other levels of addressing stigma without first doing it on the individual and communal level. I get that desire to leap right to addressing stigma at the institutional level, but my own experience tells me that’s a lot easier once you’ve had the chance to process with yourself and in safe spaces. So I think the kind of space you’re creating is really important--just bringing abortion to the table as something that can be named and talked about at all.
As you go forward, what are you still hoping to learn about fostering abortion conversations—and how are you hoping to do that learning?
AT: I’m really interested in how to foster these conversations in Northern Ireland. Doing that as an outsider and doing it in a way people feel comfortable to share, that’s the challenge. I live in a small community, and there’s a sense of there not being much privacy. I want to figure out a way that I can make the people involved feel comfortable and that there is privacy, that we can have these conversations in an intimate way, that first step, without feeling like we’re having them with the whole world. You can’t go from not ever having told anyone, to telling the world. I’ve love to watch experienced abortion conversation facilitators do their work, pick up the language they use. That’s the next step for me.
AM: How is the title of your project significant to you? What is a ‘committed citizen’?
AT: I love that Margaret Mead quote—"Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world.” I think that’s true. I saw that embodied in the character of Nora [Committed Citizen’s main character], in this second wave feminist character, feeling so driven to change a culture. To get out of your house and go and march, and disrupt. If you do it alone, nothing’s going to happen, you’re just a crazy person. But if you get a group of committed people to march next to you—which is such a feminist idea, that we’re stronger as a collective, versus this masculinist idea that, ‘I’m going to be the best, I’m going to scale the mountain first.’ If we all work together, we can get to the top.
AM: Where have you felt that in your life?
AT: In theater, when you’re putting on a show—everyone is working together. When you can’t be strong, you know someone else is going to be strong for you.
AM: And what’s your dream for this play?
AT: I would love to see it fully staged, to put on a fully produced production. I would love to see it in Northern Ireland and also to tour it. In my wildest fantasy, it’s a cultural revolution.
