Beyond the Procedure

Episode 3 – Beyond the Procedure: What Does an Abortion Doula Do?
Abortion is more than a medical procedure — it’s a deeply human experience. In this episode of Choice Chat’s Beyond the Procedure series, host Tara speaks with Rae Jardine, Julie Vautour, and Mel Fuller about the vital role of abortion doulas. Together, they explore how doulas provide logistical help, emotional care, and advocacy — reminding us that abortion is healthcare, and it’s about real people, not debate topics.

Thanks for listening to Choice Chat, a Humanist Canada podcast about choice, dignity, and reproductive justice. We’re glad you’re here. Do you have a story to share? Do you want to suggest a topic? Email us at choicechat@humanistcanada.ca or connect with us on social media. We look forward to hearing from you.

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Transcript

Choice Chat - Episode 3 - Beyond the Procedure

Tara (00:10)

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Welcome to Choice Chat. The podcast where we explore the complexities of abortion, sexual and reproductive health with empathy, clarity, and an inclusive Humanist lens. Our goal is to foster dialogue, share resources, and empower individuals to make informed decisions. I'm a member of Humanist Canada and your host, Tara. Today we're going to take a walk through the emotional landscape surrounding abortion. We’re going to talk about the human experience away from policy and access and those kinds of things to talk about what does it mean as an experience? And we have three guests who know a lot about this and have a lot of experience and insight to share. So I'm very excited to introduce you to Rae Jardine who's a sexual and reproductive health and rights professional who spent over a decade in community work before shifting focus to perinatal support. She's the founder and executive director of SRHR Hub, a loud, proud youth-led organization championing the sexual and reproductive health and rights of youth. With degrees in social service work, human rights and global development studies, Rae brings training as a sex educator, full spectrum doula, and certifications in perinatal mental health, a critical thinker and politically aware from a young age despite her rural conservative upbringing holding space for abortion always made sense and that early clarity fuels her advocacy for reproductive justice. Welcome Rae. And Julie Vautour is an abortion activist and doula originally from New Brunswick, now based in Ottawa. She moved to the city 15 years ago to pursue her studies in feminist and gender studies, eventually completing graduate work in the field. For nearly a decade, she's worked in sexual and reproductive health and rights, blending advocacy with hands-on care. In 2018, she co-founded the Ottawa Abortion Doula Collective, a grassroots initiative offering compassionate support through abortion. 

Julie has always been fiercely pro-choice, but becoming a mother two years ago deepened her conviction. Pregnancy and parenthood must always be a choice -never a mandate. Welcome, Julie. And we have with us today also Mel Fuller, a registered sexologist and abortion doula with over a decade of experience providing abortion support. She managed the abortion support program at Birthmark in Toronto and Hamilton for five years where she created an abortion doula training and trained nearly 100 people. Currently, Mel is the health promotion coordinator at Action Canada for Sexual Health and she coordinates their access line. She also offers workshops independently through the abortion doula and is slowly preparing to offer abortion support training. (3:21) Mel has a tiny dog shaped shadow named Archie, who she considers the ultimate doula. Welcome Mel and thank you all so much for joining us today. First things first, I've been pro-choice my entire life and I'm familiar with the idea of a birth doula and even a death doula, but to be perfectly honest with you in preparing for this chat today was my first time encountering the term or the role of abortion doula so to start and I think that lot of our listeners will be in the same boat, so to start what is an abortion doula? 

Julie Vatour (03:27)

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Yeah, I guess I can me

Tara (03:22)

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Perfect, Julie. Perfect.

Julie Vatour (03:31) 

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Yeah, so an abortion doula is basically a support person that will help someone go through the journey of an abortion. Whether it’s helping them navigate the system, being an emotional support, logistical support, it can really be many things, but the bottom line is you know it's going to be the support person that you need care for this, for this care that you need.

Tara (03:53)

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Okay. If you can build on that to give a sense of what kinds of things does an abortion doula do? What does that support look like? In the course of your day, as you're walking with people through this experience, what kinds of things are you doing?

Julie Vatour (04:09)

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Yeah, so I've been an abortion doula for, I don't know, seven years now. And it's so funny that you mentioned earlier that you've never heard of an abortion doula. I also hadn't heard of an abortion doula before the day that I decided to sign up for the training seven years ago. I was like, there's such thing? Okay, I'm interested, I'm in. And so it was brand new to me. From my training that I took, it was still pretty new in Canada. It's not a concept that's been here for years and years. It's, I would say probably like about 10 years old in Canada. So an abortion doula will do concretely, most of the accompaniments that I end up doing are often logistical accompaniments, driving someone from their house to the multiple appointments that they may have. Some people don't want us to come inside with them and accompany them. That's fine. We'll just be the drive. Some other really want support in the waiting room. They want support in talking to the physicians, the nurses. It really depends on the comfort level of the doula, but also what the person needs. So we really make sure to what kind of support do you need? Do you just need... Information? Do you need emotional support? Do you want me to take your mind off things while we're driving to the appointment? Do you want me to just stay silent? We really try to ask what they're looking for and really try to meet them where they're at. But it can also be like people having medical abortion over the weekend and wanting someone to chat with them over text or just call in every couple of hours to check in on them. It can be many things but in my experience from care that we provide at the Ottawa Abortion Doula Collective, I would say, 75%, if not more of it is logistical support. It always comes down to that because that's a real gap in the system of abortion in Canada. Yes, it's accessible, but it's not necessarily, It's not necessarily accessible to everyone. Even here in the city in Ottawa, you would think we're an urban city and everyone could just hop on a bus and get to the clinic. It's a little more complicated than that. So yeah.

Tara (06:24)

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Yeah.

Mel Fuller (06:26)

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Yeah, Could I jump in? Something that I, the way I often talk about it is like what abortion support looks like depends entirely on the person having the abortion, the individual doula and where they're located. I completely agree with Julie that so much of it is logistical because the reality is most people haven't really thought about how to access abortion until they have to access it. And then they're operating from a place of needing to access that care often very quickly while also navigating what is unfortunately still a stigmatized experience in a lot of Canada.  One of the major differences, I'm also trained as a birth doula and one of the main differences, and it may be also why we don't hear about abortion doulas as much, is that the experience of abortion is for many people, one that is invisible to those around them. It may not be one that they're sharing with the people in their life. And so there's this added layer where sometimes abortion doulas are playing that very intimate role of potentially being the only person that somebody has shared this experience with and everything that that kind of brings with it. And the other thing that I'll just I wanted to kinda mention as much as we don't hear a lot about abortion doulas I believe they've existed forever as long as people were having abortions. And I think a lot of people are providing or are performing the role of an abortion doula, maybe without using that language. But I know when I first wanted to become an abortion doula, it was impossible to find training. And so I trained as a birth doula to apply that knowledge. And I very quickly learned that many of the birth doulas I met were providing abortion support, but often it was more that they were visible within their community, just as somebody who could be trusted to accompany people throughout reproductive health experiences. And so then they transferred that knowledge and experience to abortion support.

Tara (08:19)

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Wow. I’m just struck by so many things that you both have said and I'm looking forward to you jumping in here Rae too, I see you nodding along. That idea that an abortion doula role has always existed in the community of women or other folk who able to give that kind of support. But, there's something so powerfully reassuring about naming it as an abortion doula and capturing what that is and what that support might look like. Maybe Rae, you can jump in. How do people find you? Who finds you and when? What point are people getting in contact with you seeking that type of support that you offer?

Rae Jardine (09:16)

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Yeah, for sure. So for me, because I work with a youth led organization, my demographic tends to skew a little bit younger. But I've had people of all ages. A lot of this work kind of happens in the in the no space. So word of mouth. Somebody will talk to a trusted person they have who knows somebody else. People often come down that way in terms of referrals. And I often deal with people who are in that anxious stage where they've made the decision, they don't know what to do, where to come next. And another thing I see a lot and a lot more recently is people very far in the timeline. And I'm sure we'll get into it that there is some time constraints in terms of abortion. But all Kinds of people I think, it was Mel who said, we see people who need, they have a need for abortion. I'm not seeing people coming who are preemptively having these discussions or preemptively thinking about it. It's people who are immediate need and it's often time bound.

Tara (10:22) 

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Are they at the point that touch with you sort of firm in their decision? Or is there sometimes an element of deciding? Still or some counseling around the decision. I see Julie nodding.

Rae Jardine (10:38)

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Sure, absolutely. I do both. Okay. I'm beginning to on a more professional basis do perinatal counseling. So sometimes it's go through the decisions or it's processing sometimes even years decades after. But I would say the majority of my work is immediate time sensitive need.

Tara (10:55)

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Okay. Julie, do you have anything to add in there?

Julie Vatour (11:00)

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Yeah, I would say that for us at the Ottawa Abortion and Doula Collective, we encounter quite a significant number of people who don't necessarily have their mindset on the decision. They’re just like, we’re kinda like a first you know they reached out, they don't even know, like they don't have an appointment to clinic, they didn't reach out to Planned Parenthood or don't know about Planned Parenthood. So we're often a first point of contact. So if I see from this first discussion that the person has not made up their mind. Some of us doulas are also trained counsellors, so great, but I personally am not. So this is where I kind of draw the line between abortion doula and counselor. So I will often, refer them to Planned Parenthood for some counselling, and tell them that once they made up their mind, we are here to continue the journey with them if that's what they decide. I've had all kinds of people. I've had like older people who are already mothers who... like recently actually I had a mom who that was a wanted pregnancy and during that pregnancy she received some health news for her other kids that really changed her decision of wanting to have another child. It was quite a heartbreaking decision for her so I like I tried to answer all the questions that she had. She was really looking for some information and I think a lot of validation too. She was really asking am I the only one? Have you ever encountered other moms in my situation? She really wanted validation that it wasn't just her that's going through this. It doesn't mean that she’s a terrible person for going through that. It's a lot of validation sometime. And you know what? I think from this accompaniment we didn't end up going through with the abortion, so even though we spoke for weeks, so it sometimes amounts to that. And that's great. I'm glad that she was able to make the best decision for herself but you know I always make sure to draw the line personally for me as an abortion doula that not a counselor, I can help as much as possible, provide as much background but if really what you need is counseling, then for sure we will direct them that way.

Tara (13:00)

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Okay, maybe one of your roles then is knowing the landscape of what other forms of support might be available to somebody who is overwhelmed and doesn't know. I've never thought too much about it in that way before, but people may have an opinion or a stance before they find themselves with an unwanted, unexpected or a second thought about a pregnancy. People are needing to make that decision in the moment. There is a clock and and it's one of the most isolating experiences I would say on the planet, so that pressure to find your way through that without knowing what's out there. 

So that's where an abortion doula may fill that role. It's made me think about, you were talking, Julie, about the first point of contact. And one of the things we wondered about is, sometimes, unfortunately, people's first point of contact is the crisis pregnancy centre, we'll call them. They still operate in Canada. They have billboards, they have ads, they have office spaces. It occurs to me as you're talking and I'm just feeling like a huge flood of gratitude and relief that you exist because this is what's needed. What you're describing may be exactly what's needed for the person seeking support who walks into one of these places or phones one of these places and gets taken down a road that is traumatizing, that leads them to guilt and shame and maybe to a decision based on an external judgement and pressure. I'm wondering if you can all say a bit more about these centres and how they operate and what they do to mislead people who are looking for more of the kind of support that you authentically are offering.

Mel Fuller (15:09)

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To kind of make the link to what we were just speaking about, I think one important thing to know is the majority of places that I see at least that actually offer pregnancy options counseling are unfortunately crisis pregnancy centres. There's a really terrible lack of services providing the support. And so personally for me as an abortion doula, when working as an abortion doula, I actually sought out that training to offer pregnancy option support because I saw how important it was. But also in my experience, the majority of people who approach me who want to talk about their options, very often they do actually know what they want. They just don't yet know that it's okay to want whatever they want. And part of that is working through like providing somebody with space to actually say what they're thinking, actually share kind of the thoughts that they're afraid that will be rejected by other people. I think the decision to continue a pregnancy is probably one of the most intimate and life-changing experiences of a person's life. And so it's an incredibly vulnerable space. And I find very often, I even actually hate calling it pregnancy options counselling. I say pregnancy options support or after abortion support, because I think sometimes that support becomes so over-formalized when the reality is that even within a lot of clinics, folks who are providing counselling don't necessarily have that training themselves and may just be more focused on, the process of informed consent and are maybe checking for ambivalence. But I think true ambivalence about a pregnancy is quite rare. People do often have a sense of what they want, but they don't have an unbiased space to explore it. There are definitely times where I've referred somebody onto counseling instead, because maybe we had several conversations and we were kind of in the same place. I think that's true ambivalence. But many people... I've found come to a decision pretty quickly. And also I think if they're reaching out to an abortion doula, sometimes they are already leaning toward that in some way. Though I've had some people reach out and ask if you're an abortion doula, can you actually provide unbiased support to me? We can have a real conversation about that, about what that means for somebody who is identifying as an abortion doula to provide full scale option support. With crisis pregnancy centres, I have seen the impact of them on many clients directly. Unfortunately, many people find their way to abortion doulas once they've already interacted with a crisis pregnancy centre. Even in my work at Action Canada, we encounter many people who contact the access line after having thought they were receiving support from crisis pregnancy centres. There’s kind of this push for a lot of these centres to I guess the way I say it is like get people in the space. So they have all these kind of tactics to get people into the physical space to provide support, which is incredibly intimidating and vulnerable. And also just like harassment tactics, like calling somebody repeatedly even when they've decided to not continue engaging. Leaving messages that are really hateful, accusing them of different things, and using misinformation and stigma, shaming people, which I just try not to get too heated about it, but I just think that it's such a disgusting form of hate, in my opinion, from people claiming to care about humanity. And it causes some really terrible harm. I think the biggest harm to people who are seeing that support is the stigma and the shame that it perpetuates.

Julie Vatour (18:46)

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If I can add, I think of one of the concrete examples that comes to mind of the tactics that crisis pregnancy centres do; I'm from New Brunswick so I followed a lot of what happened with the Clinic 554 so for a while, and if not until the end, a pregnancy crisis centre bought or like rented  the next door location to the clinic and would send their workers outside. So when potential clients or patients were about to go in their appointment to what they thought was the abortion clinic, they were greeted by these pregnancy centre staff that brought them into their own doors. So their tactics are like that for false advertising, but also literally buying next door space to actual abortion clinic. I can't, I don't remember the number, probably at Action Canada, I used to be a volunteer at Action Canada, the access line, and so I used to know this number, but there are way more pregnancy crisis centre than there are clinics. I think it's like 10 for one where I can't remember, but it is shocking. There's just so many of them. They're sneaky. Yeah.

Tara (19:59)

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This is shocking to me and just to say we can get heated. That's okay. You're very much encouraged and invited to get heated. This is disgusting, awful. So many adjectives I'm thinking of. I have seen the... billboards and ads. I’ve never been in the space. But even knowing the extent these forced birth people will go at times, I'm even shocked to hear that type sabotage and subterfuge is taking place and that they also have clearly money and resources behind them to be able to buy or rent a property and to kinda have this fake storefront to trick people into. It is totally shocking.

Rae Jardine (20:55)

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Can I add a piece on how people end up there? One thing I always like to talk about is, while I have seen people, intentionally and nefariously refer people to these centres, a lot of times you have well-intentioned helping professionals who don't know any different. They're not told in their training. It's not part of the curriculum. It's not part of the discussion. I've seen so many times a social worker, a social service worker, even a medical professional, not knowing the difference. They're honestly trying to help people refer them places. They do a quick Google. This is the first thing that comes up. And for somebody who's not in this line of work, it's really hard to tell and differentiate and see, even sometimes myself, a new one will pop up and I'll take a little second and be like, Hmm. And I'll see something and I'll be like, oh, there, there it is. I know what this is, but it's so hard for an everyday person to to know what they're getting into. Either somebody ends up there themselves or they're referred there. It's because people people don't know.

Tara (22:00)

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Which is horrifying.  I just imagine a well-meaning support or healthcare provider unknowingly giving this, that would be horrifying to think that you'd sent somebody into that situation without meaning to. You know, gosh, I'm sure it's part of a much bigger conversation, but, how do we fix this? How do we sort of get out the word about those centres? I'm sure, Action Canada and so many other people work on this daily. For our listeners, what are the kinds of things that, what are the kinds of advocacy, I guess, that people can do to help shift, to protect vulnerable people seeking one kind of care from falling into a situation where they may be emotionally, psychologically harmed? And how do we direct those vulnerable people to find you instead?

Mel Fuller (23:03)

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I think the first thing that comes to mind honestly is the Abortion Rights Coalition of Canada's resources. They are doing an incredible job of documenting crisis pregnancy centres. It's just this major project of accountability that I think they're doing. And so they have resources they've listed anti-choice organizations. These lists are available for free on their website. They have documents on how to spot a crisis pregnancy centre. I've definitely learned a lot through ARC's work. And I share that work with anyone I've trained, any workshop that I do. Anytime I have a soapbox, I'm probably sharing ARC's resources because they're just so well done. And one of the things that I talk about a lot is becoming somebody who visibly is pro, I say pro-abortion, some folks don't like that language. I just mean that I'm not afraid to say that I actually strongly believe in abortion specifically because I think it's so stigmatized that we have to say the word abortion. And, part of the issue with crisis pregnancy centres as well as they're learning to co-opt pro-choice language. So the more we don't say what we mean specifically, the more there's that risk where people like myself, like Rae, like Julie, who feel like we know quite a bit about abortion in the landscape can still look at a website and be like, where are the signs? How do I figure out if this is an actual clinic? It's wild and it's gotten worse and worse because they are learning how to sound like pro-choice folks.

So I think a big part of it is using the word abortion. People who are anti-abortion don't like using the word abortion. Knowing what resources in your community are actually real resources and talking about them anywhere. I think everyone can support abortion access without being in or doing so in a professional capacity or being an abortion doula. By just talking about abortion, sharing articles about it, sharing resources, becoming a light post for folks in your community of somebody who it's safe to say the word abortion around or safe to ask questions to, I think is how anyone listening can start advocating within their community.

Julie Vatour (25:22)

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I literally had this thing earlier this week where on buy nothing group someone was asking for resources and someone listed a bunch of resources and one was new to me. I know there's always that pregnancy crisis centre not too far from where I live that keeps coming up and every time someone mentions it I'm like, well actually don't donate to them because they are a pregnancy crisis centre. But, it’s not obvious to everyone and people when they wanna donate baby clothes or go there. And I'm making sure I tell everyone. But then that new one came up and I was like, hmm. Then I went on their website and was looking for red flags that would pop up and I was like, this is quite difficult. I'm not entirely sure. Is this just like, I don't know. So then I went online, I went to the ARC's resources and their list is updated regularly and it's quite exhaustive. And so it wasn't on there. So I was like, okay, well, from what I could tell, I see no red flags, it's not on their list. So I think it's an okay centre. It's probably not a pregnancy crisis centre. But it's becoming harder and they're finding new tactics to hide their real agenda. And so yeah, it's becoming... It's becoming harder than it was just five years ago. Five years ago, I could look at any website and be like, yeah, I see it. Absolutely within 30 seconds. But now it's like, it's more time consuming.

Tara (26:50)

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Yeah, you have to dig deeper.

Julie Vatour (26.53)

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Mm-hmm.

Rae Jardine (26.54)

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Yeah, and this is why there's so many movements to constrain their activities, so much great advocacy work because they have so many resources and so much freedom to be able to do this. And also why I'm really passionate about getting to people before, especially like I mentioned, helping professionals, getting it in the curriculum, having these conversations when they're in the classroom before they're actually out in the real world doing harm. And the more and more we talk about them, the less and less they can kind of hide in these gross little nefarious ways.

Tara (27:28)

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You know, this thread of conversation is making me think about a couple of things about language. With Choice Chat, with the podcast, we talk a lot about just providing a space and a venue for talking about abortion. Language matters. It is important. It's important to say the word. It's important to say what we mean. And, you know the reason why you've honed in, I think, on one reason why it's partly yes to make people feel comfortable. They're not alone. That this isn't shameful. You're not isolated. You're one in three people with uteruses who find yourselves in this position. But the other aspect to using language transparently, honestly, is that then other people, if we're so careful about what we're talking about, it makes it much more difficult to spot the other side of things and the folks who that co-opt the language and try to get their own agenda in there. The other thing that has made me think about language and how language matters is even the term crisis pregnancy centre. I wonder if in our community we should come up with an alternative phrase for calling them something else because even that term itself is a bit potentially misleading. It's ambiguous. It makes me think if I'm pregnant and I don't want to be or I'm not sure that I want to be, well, I'm in a crisis about a pregnancy. It makes it sound just a little too friendly to my position. It's just a thought that I have. I wonder if there's other language that we can sort of attach to centres.

Julie Vatour (29.23)

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They're often referred to as fake clinics because crisis pregnancy centre is not like we're all working in the the field so we all know what this is but I think when I speak to people who are not as knowledgeable about abortion I will refer to them as fake clinics aka crisis pregnancy centre - CPC. I think it embodies very well fake clinics at what they are. They pretend that they're a medical professional with their lab coats and ultrasound machines very often. So yeah, fake clinics.

Tara (29.51)

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Okay.

Mel Fuller (29.51) 

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Unfortunately, some of them are starting to offer some medical services and that's even more confusing. I find like anytime I say crisis pregnancy centre, I feel like I'm qualifying it with the whole definition. I'll say a crisis pregnancy centre is an anti-abortion organization. They're often religiously affiliated. I almost feel like I have like a memorized blurb, a little blurb that I tell people because I want to be clear about what I'm saying or I'll mention some of the tactics. Just to clarify, the medical services that they're, some of them are starting to offer, I think it's more in the language, some of them are starting to hire nurses, but those nurses maybe aren't actually providing medical care. But they say they have when you go on their websites, you see they have nurses on staff, or like ultrasound. I don't know a lot regulation around ultrasounds, and I don't know if they were doing this illegally, but at one point some were purchasing ultrasound machines, but weren't necessarily actually ultrasound techs. And knowing just enough to do it. So I think there's a push now to create more of an illusion of it being a health service offering pregnancy tests or ultrasounds or whatever they'll say. Cause sometimes it is just, you see there are nurses on staff and that makes you think it's a clinic.

Tara (31:06)

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Right. Okay. One thing I am just curious about is, you've said word of mouth. How else would people find you? Or find an abortion doula? I mean, you have a website. The Abortion Collective has a website. SHRH has a website. What would people search for in their area? You just Google abortion doula?

Julie Vatour (31:31)

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Yeah, I think that's the one thing I remember when I finished my training and I was okay, cool. I guess I'm a trained abortion doula now, but how do I get the word out there? How will I let people know? And there's also the concern of putting yourself out there. Of course, if I were to advertise Julie Vautour abortion doula, contact me I would get a lot of hate and I'd be targeted by anti-abortion folks, which we are but at least our names are not on there. But we do a lot of outreach in the community. We try to be in those spaces. We try to be at Pride. We try to be at community fairs to spread the word. And thankfully, most of us doulas are already connected with various organizations that work for SRHR in the city. I'm also on the board of the only abortion clinic in the Gatineau area. So we all are connected and we try to reach out. Thanks to partners like Action Canada, the Access Line and also Planned Parenthood, they spread the word to providers. And we also try send some letters here and there. All the clinics in the region know about us because we've visited, we've reached out to them, but it's a work that we have to do every couple of years because staff change and the word could get lost. I remember that was the main thing when I was a volunteer on the access line at Action Canada. People are calling to know what are the real options around them. Because if you Google Ottawa Abortion or wherever you are in Canada, the likely thing that will show up on Google is a pregnancy crisis centre and likely not an abortion clinic because most abortion clinic don't want to advertise. Some of them are online but not all of them because they're targeted that it's a risk for them to be out there. Action Canada has a list of providers that are not necessarily available online. 

I guess I'm hoping that when there's been enough hit on our website when people type Ottawa abortion we're hopefully at the top. But that's how we get the word out there. It's really word of mouth. And to go back to something that I said earlier, that abortion doulas are maybe 10 years old in Canada. What I meant is that, people have been doing, this work unofficially, for years obviously. But it has more collective like ours have started to pop up in the past 10 years. We really started from the work that Shannon Hardy in Nova Scotia started, about 10 years ago. And she was really the first official one to be like, okay, I'm abortion doula training and from what I know, then in 2018, the Ottawa Abortion Doula started based on the work that has been done in Nova Scotia. And ever since, there's been dozens of similar collectives or organizations, really grassroots organizations that spread out across Canada. We've had many people reach out - I want to set up something like you're doing in Ottawa in Edmonton or in somewhere that I don't even know in Canada. It's really grown. The more we talk about it in podcasts like this. Every occasion that I have, I will drop abortion doula. I will spread the word, right? That's how we get people to know that this exists and you can reach out for help, tell your friends. Yeah.

Tara (34:50)

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Excellent.

Thank you for sharing that. It is such a conundrum right? The aspect of safety too really makes it complicated. Your personal safety, abortion provider's safety. In that aspect, the anti-choice movement is very effective at silencing us from saying the word abortion. Especially if you cannot and we've talked to some other people in the course of doing the podcast too that if you cannot advertise or mention that you offer this service, it really impacts your ability to connect with the people who need it. And so it's just a conundrum that we see throughout this landscape, I think. I wanted to ask you, aside from the services that you provide, is there other abortion-affirming mental health type of support that's accessible for people seeking abortions in Canada.  Where else can people turn for post-abortion maybe an add-on to that question is; what would a better healthcare system look like that was able to offer health support or emotional support following post procedure?

Rae Jardine (36:16)

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I can jump there.

Tara (36:17)

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Or what, yeah, just jump in. Great.

Rae Jardine (36.20)

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That's not great for me. I'll be honest. This is one of those really sticky points for me. As I enter more and more into the mental health field is, in my opinion, it doesn't exist. I have a lot of specialized perinatal training and abortion might be very quickly glossed over as like a footnote in a, four or five, six week training. In my experience, it's very similar to I'll do the work that happens in the grassroots and knowing the people and knowing who's in your community and knowing their values and getting that community connection. As far as curriculums, off the top of my head, I can't think of a good abortion training or even a lot of the options training programs have been kind of closed down or coming out of the States or are ridiculously expensive and not financially accessible to people who really want that information and want to do that work. It’s tough out there. 

Tara (37:07)

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Here's a sort of nitty gritty question then. Do you charge for your services? 

Julie Vatour (37:14)

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We were all volunteer based because we recognize that most people who will seek out our help, don't have the financial mean to pay for that. That's not to say that everyone who requires abortion support, lives in poverty or like people who have it all together and are very able to pay for support. And sometimes these people they will donate money they feel so grateful. They know they can afford to pay for that support and that's great they'll often donate to our collective but we really came from the idea that yes this is work that should be paid that it's valid work it's it's real work. And, I would love to see one day abortion doulas collective like ours or organization that can have payroll and staff people. But the reality is that for us here at the Ottawa Abortion Doula we're all people with full-time jobs and we often have volunteers who want to volunteer their time. And they're, "but I'm only able to volunteer nights and weekends." I'm like cool. Abortions don't happen nights and weekend. Abortions happen Monday to Friday 9 to 5. The reality is that most of us end up taking our own personal days, sick days or vacation days, to accompany clients to appointments. It's often very last minute because it's little turnaround. So that's my reality. But, I do know some doulas and not sure if Mel, that's the case, but some doulas that do this as paid work because they're also full spectrum doulas and that's their living. But for us, that's not the case.

Mel Fuller (38:46)

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Yeah, it really depends there are so many different possible structures. I will say that the way  the training that I provide when I was running the abortion doula training and the way I'm formulating its future iteration is very much that there's no one way to do this support. There's no one way to structure it. There are some people who work within volunteer collectives like Julie, and it's a really beautiful system because the idea would be that no one person is doing all of it, right? You're spreading it. At Birthmark, we were actually paid contractors. So no one was providing support for free. Birthmark is a registered nonprofit, sorry, registered charity organization. I'm still learning the differentiation, but that process worked. Was also grant funded at different times so the work can be precarious, the funding piece. For me personally, I have not given up on the dream of paid abortion doula work and I do actually believe it's possible but one of my past doula teachers some, it was a birth doula training but shared some wisdom that I come back to a lot which is this idea that if you are offering your services for free, you need to have a very clear idea of what work is sustaining you. If you do have other work, what is paying the bills? I don't really think anyone could sustain themselves entirely on abortion doula work unless they were working within an organization the way I used to at Birthmark. And currently I provide free support because I have my needs met by another form of employment. And I'm very, very lucky to have flexibility to do that. But I have also supported many people who want to pay, who have the means to pay. And so I think it's really important, even when folks are offering free support to have mechanisms in place for people to make a donation, for example, to pay it forward in some way, because for some people that exchange is really important. And at least when I was at Birthmark, our support was free to everyone and our abortion support was the only program that didn't have any eligibility requirements because of the time sensitive nature, the stigma where folks are often navigating it alone. 

But what I did find is probably about half of the folks who were seeking support were asking how to pay. I guess a narrative I see sometimes is like people shouldn't have to pay for this support or doula support. And I do tend to push back on that a little bit because it is labour. And I think that that's a surefire way for doulas of any kind to burn out to only provide support for free. But I think there are as many models as there are doulas, right? What is going to work for one person won't work for someone else. And I actually find this one of the most challenging parts of training other doulas is sometimes people just want a clear answer of like, how do I do this? But what is gonna feel good for me and what has felt good for me is constantly evolving depending on my life circumstance. There've been periods of time where I'm like, I cannot provide any abortion support for the next several months because I know that I'm not in a stable enough place to be supporting others in that way. And I think that having that flexibility is also part of the beauty of the doula role in general. And the fact that it's not regulated in certain ways is that we can make it work for us and for our clients. And that means being able to actually centre them if we know how we're showing up and we can communicate it clearly to them as well.

Tara (42:19)

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And how do you get support yourselves for the emotional work? How do you sustain yourselves emotionally, psychologically, energy wise? What are you finding? What strategies? What do you need that works for you to keep you going?

Mel Fuller (42:39)

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Community is probably the biggest one. Conversations like this, like other people who care about abortion, who are knowledgeable about abortion. Knowing who you can call when you're stuck. Whether that's while you're providing support you're asked to provide a type of support that you're not sure you can do or that you've never done before. I think like having a community of people who are also providing that support, who are Julia was speaking earlier about finding a website and not knowing if it's real, I was just thinking about all the people I call kind of in a row, to be like do you know this resource? And I have found folks who work in and around abortion are just incredible people. I feel like I can contact somebody that I barely know, but that I know works in the same area and I've never gotten the cold shoulder. And so I think like part of it is seeing it as a community we're building constantly and supporting each other. So that's my first thought. I'll give the floor over to Rae or Julie though to say more.

Rae Jardine (43:36)

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I think you hit it on the head. Community is number one for me as well. Next up is boundaries. Difficult for me personally to navigate. I've lived and learned and learned a lot of hard lessons and it's constantly evolving. But, for me, I always try to work through how can I offer something that's going to be sustainable. If I'm not able to offer it and, setting expectations in the community that I can't stand by, especially given the current environment where we're seeing a funding crisis. I think this is the worst we've seen in a long time for this kind of work. It's sometimes focusing on myself. It's sometimes referring out. It's also having those spaces. If I know who to call, I can't take this case on. I really can't. It's having somebody that I know I can call and not taking all that onus on yourself as well, because that's a mistake I made in my early career. And now I've lived and I've learned and I'm doing better. I don't know, I'll be honest, learning by fire I think comes a lot in this work.

Julie Vatour (44:34)

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I echo so much what both of you said, community and boundaries, absolutely. For us here at the OADC, that's the short, because our name is so long, we have like a buddy system. If I'm out for an accompaniment, I'll have a backup doula that will check in on me, because you're picking up people at their houses. You need some kind of security. But also group chats and we make ourselves available for debrief. Sometimes you just need to call and debrief because some accompaniments are more intense than others. We kind of have that, but I think also, boundaries every doula is different , like I'm comfortable going into people's houses, but some of my colleagues are not, and that's totally fine. You do what you are to preserve your mental health. I've also taken a break while I was on mat leave, because I do not have physically, mentally, logistically cannot do this. So, there's boundaries, but it all goes back to community. So, I know people that I don't really know but I know in other cities that I've relied on and that I've referred to. And I think when we're out in the community, community fairs, the support that we get from people is so overwhelming in a good way and it really fills my bucket and get me going. It's like a boost of energy to just know how grateful people are that such thing exists, that we exist. I'm excited because usually in May we have a fair, the spirit is good and it gives me energy for the next couple of months. But, yeah, the community is everything.

Tara (46:01)

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Beautiful. What is the fair that you're referring to?

Julie Vatour (46:05)

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So one of the fair that we always go to is the Arlington Five Market. It's mostly artisan, but they always leave a couple table for small grassroots organization like ours. We actually sell plant cuttings and abortion t-shirts and stuff like that just to raise funds for the organization. Because again, we're grassroots, we're non-registered because it's so complicated again to be accountable to funders and donors because the work that we do is so particular. We pick up people,  have supported teenagers that their parents don't know. There's just so blurred lines funders would not be willing to fund this because it's too risky. So we personally taking those risks and we're doing this knowledgeably, but it's all with our comfort level. So we are all community funded. All donations. Obviously we're volunteers, so we don't need lots of money to function. It would be nice if we could indeed have a paid person to run this because it's at times really consuming. There's waves. And we never know. There's no pattern. There's no time in the year where we're most needed. It comes in waves.

Tara (47:22)

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Not like nine months after Valentine's Day or

Julie Vatour (47:25)

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Except for the pandemic, where nine months after the pandemic, we actually had a surge in, oh yeah, and we kind of saw it coming like people are indoors and really bored, yeah, I think we're gonna see it, and we were right, unfortunately. But yeah, other than that, there's no time of the year where we're more needed. Yeah.

Tara (47:47)

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Speaking and risk taking, can you talk a little bit about your own feelings of safety personally your sense of personal security. What are there things steps youve need to take to make sure you remain safe in your communities? 

Mel Fuller (47:59)

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I've had more anxiety about being targeted than the action of being targeted and I think that that's something that has fueled me taking certain actions. Like reaching out to different folks within Canada who are prominently outspoken about abortion and have been for a long time to ask them what they do. To ask them what their practices are and that has informed a lot of my own. And just being thoughtful about what information is available. There's an organization actually in the US that I'm a huge fan of, I just think they're so great, called the Digital Defense Fund, and they specifically create materials for people who organize an abortion on how to protect themselves. And it is US based, so, not everything is relevant, but the majority is, and all of their materials are available for free online. They have all of PowerPoint presentations available on things like assessing your risk level. How to assess how big of a risk something actually is. Acknowledging the fact when we are targeted, people are using information that we willing put out there.  So, just thinking in certain ways of what does it mean to be visible, like I was saying earlier in your community speaking about abortion while also feeling safe. And I think that that is going to look different for every person. Again, like some people will feel perfectly comfortable in certain ways, whereas others won't. I definitely have some non-negotiables for myself where even if I really wanna do a thing, if it crosses a certain boundary I've set for myself outside of when I wanted to do that thing, I will consider that. It sucks to have to think about that sometimes. Like I sometimes think about things I'd like to do, and I feel like there's this added layer of needing to think about whether, ⁓ like an example of where this came up recently was I wanted to volunteer in something that's not abortion related at all. And had this thought of what will happen if they Google me? Will they want me to volunteer? And, on the surface, I'll tell myself well, I don't really want to volunteer somewhere if they're not going to want me there because of this. But at the same time, there are certain areas where it might not even necessarily be that an organization is anti-abortion, but abortion stigma exists for anyone who has any relationship to abortion at all. Whether we agree with it or not, it exists in the world and it's something that we need to navigate. So that comes into play even when I'm taking a weekly class for a hobby or something. There's always a decision point of do I want to get into this potentially? I might share what I do and the person says, that's amazing, that's cool. And we have this really beautiful conversation and other times I can start to feel unsafe. So I think it's this constant evaluating as we're moving through and also balancing, not just getting a little paranoid sometimes and realizing like, okay, no one's actually targeting us. This is fine. I don't think we're the people who experienced the most risk and I'm more interested in supporting the folks who do. I'm more able to do that if I don't get really nervous about it. So knock on wood that that continues.

Rae Jardine (51:01)

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Yeah, for me, I'm really cognizant about safety and security. And it's one of the most common things I harp at for my team. They always hear me. They're like, yes, I know you said it. I'm like, I'm going to keep saying it. And a lot of that comes from some of my global work where I've worked in places where abortion is illegal. I've seen people die because of their work for sexual reproductive health and rights. So some of this stuff is simple logistical, get a business address, get a second phone number. And like Mel kind of said, picking and choosing. Somebody asks me what I do sometimes. Yeah, I work in nonprofits - do community work. Okay, great, moving on. Sometimes I disengage. I live in an area where there's a lot of anti-choice protests. I usually don't engage unless I'm having a really bad day. I just keep going. I used to do a lot of on the ground activism, protest. I don't do it so much anymore. So it's about what works for everybody, evaluating. And I always say this is one of the areas that is not given attention to at all. We don't have funding to do these kinds of things and put in the safety and security protocols. At SRHR Hubs one of our projects was cyber attacked and we had bots completely ruin a really great project because we didn't have the resources. The funder said, "Well, that sucks. Get your grant report in." And that was the end of that. We were left to deal with this situation. Sometimes it's not about just safety and security. Sometimes the lower level is people just wishing to disrupt your work. I get a lot of spam emails that people just want to make your life difficult so that you don't have time to do the other work because you have to sort through what's a real person, what's a fake person. Yeah. This is something I take really, really serious and I think it's an evolving conversation and something we have to do more work on because I don't know what the right answer is. I've been doing this work a long time and I know some things, but it's ever-changing.

Tara (52.54)

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It really is. Year over year, things are changing so much. Julie.

Julie Vatour (53:00)

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I also echo what you both said, though I'm thinking that I might not be as careful as maybe I should be, other than when sometimes I'm traveling or stuck in a plane next to someone that I suspect might not be receptive to me telling them that I do abortion work. I feel it happens whenever I travel to countries that abortion is not legal. I will decide if I disclose if I do that work or not. One of the other security measures is that obviously, if you go on the OADC website, none of our names or faces are there because we don't want our pictures out there and necessarily all of that, even though, we will post, once in a while, a picture of some of the team members, on social media. We're not, I guess, as careful maybe we should be. Other than the occasional dead fetus email that we'll get once in a while, we haven't necessarily been targeted. But I myself remember one time I was speaking at an abortion book launch and there was some anti-choice taking pictures of me, writing things down and stuff like I just I'm not in danger. There's 100 people in this - it's okay. But I just know somewhere that my name is on an anti-choice file in an Excel document.  I know I'm somewhere because I am quite vocal online and… my younger days I was more active too. I still go to the yearly protests on the Hill for the March for Life. The earlier days when we were less people, it definitely I felt more threatened. I felt my security was at risk because, I remember years we were maybe 15 people against 2000 folks. But the landscape has changed and there's a lot more people out there and I feel much more safe. But some years were more risky, I would say, to be out there being pro-abortion, for sure.

Tara (54:59)

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Well, thank you so much for sharing all of that and we appreciate risks that you take in your life every day and the risk you take in speaking on a podcast. We've made a deliberate decision to not capture video and faces for that reason. We just so appreciate your time. We really got into the nitty-gritty of what it is that you do. I just want to move towards wrapping up our chat. But could you each share one thing that you hope a listener would take away from this episode today. And maybe we'll start with you, Rae.

Rae Jardine (55:43)

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The thing for me is I want to move us away from abortion as this debate topic. Something that's so unpersonal. This is a real life issue with real life people. And it's not as simple as this binary that we've created of anti-choice and pro-choice. I would love to move us more into the human messiness and everything that comes with this. Because it's about more. I think our discussions aren't nuanced enough and I would love to have us humanize this issue and meet each other where we're at and have discussions.

Tara (56:19)

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Beautiful. Julie or Mel?

Julie Vatour (56:23)

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Yeah, I guess the one thing maybe it's not specific really to abortion doula, just abortion in general is that one thing that I always try to remind people is that abortion doesn't have to be a huge decision. It doesn't have to be something that you absolutely feel like you would need perhaps an abortion doula. Sometimes it can just be a really easy decision. It's an obvious one and life goes on and it's no big deal. And I think we forget that becoming a parent is a life-changing decision. But not being one can also be a very easy one. And I think we tend to forget about that. So that's the one thing I want to tell everyone is that abortion doesn't have to be a big deal. It often isn't, and that's okay.

Tara (57:08)

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Yeah, and earlier, Mel, you said something about making the decision to continue a pregnancy. And actually, that seems like the bigger choice with the more ramifications on a person's life. Mel, what's one thing that you would like a listener to take away from our chat today?

Mel Fuller (57:27)

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This feels connected to what Rae was also just actually what Rae and Julie were both saying, but when we aren't having conversations about abortion that are more nuanced because we're kind of stuck in this debate. It's really easy to forget or never learn that there's no one abortion experience. It gets very oversimplified that abortion looks a specific way. Everyone deals with it differently. Everyone copes well or doesn't cope well or needs to cope at all. When the reality is that just like any human experience, there's such a vast variety of ways that people navigate abortion and there's no way to really predict it. If we don't get to have the deeper conversations about abortion, it's really easy to erase all of those experiences and for people to not see themselves in the way abortion is talked about. So the thing I would like people to take away is that there's no specific way to know what your abortion experience will look like or what it looked like. There was no wrong way for you to go through your abortion experience. And like any other experience in life, it was probably unique to you.

Tara (58:40)

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Thank you, thank you, thank you so much. This whole podcast is a labour of love that we've taken on to humanize, to get into the discussions, to delve into the messiness and the individual and human, human, human nature of abortion. That it’s not standing on a protest line. This is people's lives and it’s healthcare. In Canada, it's our right and we need to talk about it more. We're going to leave it there for today. 

I want the biggest thank you to Rae and Julie and Mel, to you for sharing your time and your experience with us. I'm so privileged and feel so honoured to have made the connection with you and to have gotten to hear your voices today. I thank you most sincerely. I know that for listeners, they're taking away a deep connection that you've shared today. 

Until next time, abortion is healthcare in Canada. It's your right. Thanks for joining us. Bye-bye for now. We'll talk to you next time.

EPISODE RESOURCES

SRHR Hub Toronto https://www.facebook.com/SRHRHubsToronto/

Ottawa Abortion Doula Collective: https://www.ottawaabortiondoulas.com/home

BirthMark Toronto: https://birthmarksupport.com/

Action Canada for Sexual Health & Rights: https://www.actioncanadashr.org/ 

https://www.actioncanadashr.org/resources 

Access Line: 1-888-642-2725  TEXT 613-800-6757  

Email access@actioncanadashr.org

Abortion Rights Coalition of Canada – Resources:  https://www.arcc-cdac.ca/resources/

Planned Parenthood: https://www.plannedparenthood.org/learn

Digital Defense Fund: https://digitaldefensefund.org/  https://digitaldefensefund.org/ddf-guides/abortion-privacy