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Commentary
BY ANN-DERRICK GAILLOT
S T A F F W R IT E R
or Oregon residents seeking an
abortion, finding a clinic or provider
to perform one is easy.
What is often harder to come by is the
rest of the experience - the personal
support, a ride to your appointment, a
sympathetic ear, a hand to squeeze or even
simply someone to bear witness. In
Portland, a new group of abortion doulas
hopes to change that reality for the
thousands of people in and around the city
who obtain abortions each year.
Cascades Abortion Support Collective is a
small, all-volunteer group of abortion
support and transportation workers who
provide people seeking abortions in and
around the Portland area with logistical,
physical, emotional and informational
support. Born of Portland’s reproductive
justice and doula communities, the
organization’s mission is to fight abortion’s
social stigma by empowering those it serves
through the experiences before, during and
after ending a pregnancy.
“Anyone in any experience deserves
abortion support, that’s one oi our
grounding principles,” said CASC co-founder
Ariel, speaking with Street Roots in her
Portland home.
These are not easy times to be an
abortion rights advocate, and the members
of CASC refuse to give their last names for
that reason.
“We decline to provide our last names
because as a collective, we feel it is
important to insure that anyone can
participate in CASC without needing to
further endanger themselves,” Meg said.
Unfortunately, we currently live in a society
which highly stigmatizes abortion work with
individuals and groups even going to violent
extremes to attack this community. For this
and other reasons, we only provide first
names when speaking with press”
Ariel, along with fellow co-founder and
reproductive justice activist Meg, co-founded
the group in early 2015, recruiting from
their network of full-spectrum doulas to
support people through all reproductive
experiences, including abortion, surrogacy,
miscarriages and stillbirths. After months of
formalizing procedures, compiling resources
and focusing their mission, CASC held their
first official meeting of collective members
in May. Since then, the small collective of
four core collective members with
backgrounds in reproductive justice and full-
spectrum doula work, said they have
supported about 10 people through their
abortion experiences, providing those they
support with rides to and from their
appointments, coaching in physical and
emotional coping mechanisms, and
informational referrals and support.
According to CASC, those whom they have
already supported found the group via their
S
A walk in her shoes
Abortion is legal but carries dam aging stigmas fo r the
people who seek the service. A new organization in
Portland is working to change that.
website, their Facebook page, word of
mouth or via referrals from NARAL Pro-
Choice America and the Oregon-based
Network for Reproductive Options.
Here’s how they work: A ring to the
CASC’s phone number connects callers with
an available member of the collective who
then does a short intake interview,
understanding what procedure or
experience the caller is seeking support for
and getting a feel for their specific needs.
The caller is then matched with the
collective’s best suited doula and the two
meet in a public place to further discuss
what the caller wants from their abortion
experience. Before the abortion procedure,
the doula is-there to answer questions about
the procedure and help the person
formulate questions for a medical provider.
During the procedure, however, the doula’s
role can vary from intimate support such as
holding the patient’s hand or applying
accupressure points to more hands-off
support methods such as fetching water or
waiting in the other room to be there when
it’s all over.
“It’s such a different experience for
different people, which is why we really try
to focus on having broad skills knowing that
what people need is going to be vastly
different,” said Heather, an abortion doula
and collective member. Support continues
after the procedure is over, with abortion
doulas, checking in one day, one week and
one month afterward to offer a listening ear,
advice or connection to more longer term
community resources if necessary.
Collective members also send each person
home with abortion after-care kits
containing heat wraps, sanitary pads, tea,
chocolate, chapstick, candles and a list of '
after-care resources.
“It’s both to provide them with these
physical items, but also as a gesture of this
is an experience that deserves support,”
said Ariel, who believes stigma associated
with abortion prevents people from getting
the emotional support they may need after
obtaining one. “People really often take on
that [stigma] and start to devalue
themselves or it affects their identity or
their self worth, and that’s what we’re trying
to combat,” said Heather.
Abortion and full-spectrum doula
collectives have been forming across the
country in the past decade, perhaps the
most well-known being New York City’s The
Doula Project, which formed in 2007. San
Francisco’s The Bay Area Doula Project
formed in 2011 and held an abortion doula
training in Portland in June 2014, which
CASC members attended before organizing
the following year. Like The Doula Project
and The Bay Area Doula Project, CASC
operates in a state with largely no legal -
restrictions on abortions. Under Oregon law,
individuals and private-institutions can
refuse to provide abortions, but legal
restrictions such as parental consent or
waiting periods are not in place. Even so,
abortions are not easily accessible for many
of Oregon’s rural residents. Of the 12
Oregon abortion clinics listed on the
Network for Reproductive Options’s website,
six are located in Portland and all are in
cities, making transportation, not legal
access, a major barrier for people in remote
communities seeking abortions.
And while being located in Oregon means
CASC isn’t guiding and supporting people
through the same legal obstacles they would
face in other states, they still cite defeating
the stigma of abortion as their main
concern. “This is where we are and we’re
excited to serve this community,” said
Heather. “Because no matter where you are
there’s no place where it’s easy and
unstigmatized to get an abortion.”
2015 saw national anti-abortion
movements culminate when Planned
Street Roots • Jan. 8-14, 2016
Parenthood president Cecile Richards
testified in front of a House Oversight and
Government Reform Committee hearing in
September. Three months later Senate
Republicans voted to strip Planned
Parenthood of federal funding. Closer to
home, the Planned Parenthood on
Northeast MLK Jr. Boulevard continues to
be the site of frequent anti-abortion protests
and anti-abortion billboards, the work of
Minneapolis-based nonprofit ProLife Across
America. According to ProLife Across
America President Mary Ann Kuharski, who
spoke to Street Roots via phone from the
organization’s Minneapolis headquarters,
2015 was the first year the organization put
up its billboards in the state, reflecting what
it said is a recent rise in donations to the
organization from Oregon residents. The
organization claimed to have paid for 60
billboards in the Portland area this past
year.
Violence is also a concern for the group.
In November 2015, a gunman opened fire on
a Planned Parenthood clinic in Colorado
Springs, Colo., killing three people.
“Portland is a liberal, more secular, more
alternative or progressive community,” said
Heather, “but that doesn’t protect us from
people who take extreme acts.”
CASC has a number of safety procedures
in place to protect both the abortion service
workers and those who seek their services.
And while abortion providers are most
frequently the targets of anti-abortion
extremist violence, others in the pro-choice
orbit are vulnerable to threats as well. In fall
2015, Seattle writers Amelia Bonow and
Lindy West created the #ShoutYourAbortion
hashtag to encourage women to fight stigma
by sharing their abortion experiences on
social media. After #ShoutYourAbortion
went viral, The New York Times reported
the two began receiving threats and the
location of Bonow’s residence was exposed
online.
Despite the risks, CASC volunteers are
committed to sustaining their work through
further public outreach and development of
partnerships with area abortion clinics and
providers. In February, CASC plans to hold
an abortion doula training in which birth
doulas and laypeople alike can receive
training in emotional and physical support
skills and learn about area-specific abortion
resources. They hope the training will
eventually translate into more abortion
support workers and transportation
volunteers for their small operation so they
can expand their services outside of the
Portland metro area.
“We have this sense there’s this
emergency,” Ariel said. “This is an
emergency, the fact that people don’t have
the support they need. So we want to do
what we can to fix it and address it. But also
we want this organization to exist long term,
so we’ve also been taking time to set roots
that will enable us to grow.”