The Washington Post just proved once again how out-of-touch the mainstream media  is about the national abortion debate by publishing a 3,745-word puff piece praising the work of volunteers to serve as doulas who hold the hands of women as they have an abortion.

Dave Andrusko of the National Right to Life is reporting on the story that recently ran in the Washington Post entitled, “The long five minutes: Abortion doulas bring comfort during a complicated time.”

Written by Monica Hesse, the Post piece describes exactly what a doula is:

“A doula, traditionally, was trained to support a pregnant woman through her delivery, explained a facilitator from a group called D.C. Doulas for Choice. Traditional doulas weren’t medical professionals, but they could hold hands, offer distraction, supply heating pads. In a roomful of doctors and nurses focusing on the delivery of a healthy baby, a doula was focused solely on the emotional well-being of the mother.”

However, D.C. Doulas for Choice, a volunteer-based collective, believes that even pregnant women who decide not to become mothers should have equal support.

“And so, if the aspiring doulas in this room made it through training, and apprenticed through a series of shadow shifts, then this is what they were signing up for: To be in a surgical room with a woman through one of the most intimate emotional experiences of her life; to hold her hand while she has an abortion," Hesse writes.

Yes, women who have abortions are in dire need of support due to the well-documented psychological and emotional impact of abortion. But this article isn’t about that. It focuses on a volunteer doula named Grace who grew up in a Christian home and became a birth doula. After aborting her own child earlier in the year for reasons of convenience, she decided to volunteer as an abortion doula. She was assisted by an experienced abortion doula named Tahira who showed her how to approach patients who were waiting to have their abortions.

For example, they approached one woman about whether or not she would like some comfort and support during the procedure. “I could really use that right now,” the woman said.

Once inside the room, they coached her to take deep breaths while she was being arranged on the table, telling her, “I know this is scary but you’re strong.”

They described the sound of the doctor’s medical vacuum to be “about as loud as a Dustbuster.”

Of course, the only mention they made of the human remains that were flushed down the tube was “there was blood in a tube.”

The article goes on to describe their macabre conversations with other patients during the procedure which ranged from asking if there was anything good on Netflix to what kind of gym routines they used.

One of the patients admitted that she was really upset about the abortion, to which Tahira replied, “That’s okay, that’s normal.”

As Andrusko reports, “Hesse’s piece goes on and on and on, a whopping 3,745 words, to be exact. But the core message is a kind of lethal solidarity where the abortion doula learns to leave any ‘hang-ups’ at the door and masters the ‘list of neutral phrases and topics’ to use while the woman takes her child’s life.”

Micaiah Bilgers, writing for LifeNews, notes that Grace is one of the few doulas from her training class who still volunteers.

“Many others apparently could not stomach standing in a surgical room watching as an unborn baby’s life is destroyed,” Bilgers writes.

“It’s interesting, abortion activists claim pro-life advocates stigmatize women when we say that an abortion destroys a baby’s life or encourage women to see an ultrasound of their unborn child. They want the public to think of an abortion as a routine women’s medical procedure. But these abortion doula programs show that even they know deep down that an abortion is something more. They know that an abortion is emotionally and ethically troubling, though they may not consciously admit why.”

In her haste to make abortion doulas sound like champions of women, Hesse fails to address any real issues such as why women need to have their hand held in the first place.

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