What's Possible with Loving Abortion Care
Kristen (she/her) is a post-abortion counselor and community mental health advocate. In addition to her education in counseling psychology, she trained as a birth doula and abortion doula and has led workshops using ritual and community-resourcing for people who have experienced abortion(s).
Connect with her here: https://www.abortionwheel.com/
Show Notes:
Umbrella term of pregnancy loss
What is my voice? What’s the message? Why be here?
Abortion space- “desert terrain”
“There is something sort of mysterious about the work”
Integrating the abortion experience
“What does it mean to reidentify as someone whose had an abortion or someone whose had more than one?”
“I didn’t know that I was allowed to say that I was grieving, I couldn’t have identified that in myself”
What did therapy and abortion bump into a disconnect?
“People don’t know how to respond to someone who has had an abortion?”
Caliban and the Witch
“We don’t know how to grieve as a culture”
“When you’re grieving and society doesn’t recognize your loss”
Focus has been on prevention of abortion not abortion care
How do we avoid this hard thing from happening? vs. How do we be in the hardness of it?
When the grief isn’t even yours- collective hurt
“What is our womb holding and what is it letting go?”
“What’s been held, what’s been lost?”
“An abortion with shed light on things you haven’t looked at”
The identity shift in and around abortion
“Life comes into this really narrow view”
“I want to have a baby, but I’m not ready now”
“What are the motives of becoming a parent?” “Why am I becoming a parent?”
Reproductive Justice
What If ing
Self-Trust “Do I trust myself?”
“Connecting to intuition, feeling grounded, clearing out other people’s voices… “
“Can you trust that voice that came through?”
“There’s so much complexity in everyone’s experience”
“Building the tolerance for the mystery”
Health is learned
Justification to make it okay
“The story gets to just exist”
All words are messy and everyone has different meaning for all their words
Acceptance doesn’t mean “liking”
This is a thing that happened, now I can work from there
So much to talk about in this desert
Let people have their feelings
“I don’t want what happened to you to happen to me”
“Let go of your own curiosity, sometimes your curiosity isn’t serving the other person”
What would have happened if I didn’t make it about me?
“Shed light on what it means to be with someone”
“Protect people from being dropped”
Let’s create more tools to listen and share
Embracing of uncertainty that’s vital to finding peace
Embrace the uncertainty because it’s all you’re ever gonna find
We can have fun talking about abortion
Even though there are no answers and it feels uncertain, we want to be here
Existential Kink
How do we be in the richness of this hard thing?
“People who experience loss through abortion, you know something about life that everyone will come in contact with sometime”
“Don’t let the psychic gold get robbed from you”
Kassi Underwood- May Cause Love
@kristenportney_therapy
