Radical Care for Pregnant People: Learning from Full-Spectrum Doulas

📣Join us for a panel and zine-making workshop with the Ad'iyah Collective and Feminist Miscarriage Project🎨What does it mean to be a full spectrum doula? How can we support people through their pregnancy ending, whether the pregnancy ends with a birth or an abortion, a miscarriage or a stillbirth? How do we honour their experience in all its complexity? What does the full spectrum approach offer us as community organisers, caretakers, researchers, human beings? Insofar as doulas accompany their clients/friends/comrades through major life transitions, in this instance in and out of pregnancy, the role fulfils one of the most basic functions of the social fabric: companionship. This is nothing new. All over the world and for millennia, folks have been walking alongside their fellows as they become pregnant and, one way or another, cease to be pregnant.A full spectrum approach acknowledges that all pregnant people experience the end of their pregnancy and that this end demands care. It is community-centred, holistic, and inherently expansive. In the first portion of the day, then, we'll learn more about what it means to be a full-spectrum doula with Dr. Victoria Browne and our panellists. Learning how to support pregnant people in the first instance, and perhaps too how to deliver a more just world for everyone. Then Naz Toorabally will lead us in a zine-making workshop to reflect on how we can apply the lessons of a full spectrum approach to our own lives and practice. PanellistsVictoria Browne is Reader in Political Philosophy at Loughborough University; and author of Pregnancy Without Birth: A Feminist Philosophy of Miscarriage (Bloomsbury, 2022). Mary Mahoney is one of the founders of The Doula Project in New York City (est. 2007); and co-author of The Doulas: Radical Care for Pregnant People (The Feminist Press, 2016).AZ is founder of the Ad'iyah Collective (est. 2022) and can also be found doula-ing at Doulas Decolonising.Sara Omar (she/her) is a researcher and recently-trained abortion doula whose research explores expansive community and how imagining new ways of relating can expand our capacity to care. About the Feminist Miscarriage ProjectThe Feminist Miscarriage Project is a collaboration led by two feminist academics, Victoria Browne and Susie Kilshaw, promoting intersectional approaches to miscarriage grounded in bodily autonomy, social justice, and solidarity across the full spectrum of pregnancy endings. It is funded by the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council.About the Ad'iyah CollectiveAd'iyah exists as a radical alternative to what pregnancy ending support could look like. Our collective is centred around community. We heal together, we share knowledge, and we recognise our Divine right to bodily autonomy.