As conversations over abortion rights and Roe v. Wade continue, does the papaya effort to "demystify" and advocate for abortion help or hurt the cause? Leave your comments below.
The following is an excerpt from a Vice story about papaya "abortion" workshops.
When the papaya was fully “dilated,” [abortion provider Zoey Thill] placed a plastic tube called a cannula inside and attached it to a manual vacuum aspirator, a plastic, syringe-like device, sucking out the inner contents of the papaya: what, for our purposes, was the pregnancy. From start to finish, the procedure had taken no more than three minutes. Thill admired the seeds in the plastic tube. “This is a really [expletive] good one.” Then it was our turn. We partnered up, holding the papayas for each other as we repeated what she had just shown us. I felt slightly nervous, even though I knew I was only practicing on a fruit, not a person. Thill held the papaya for me and after I dilated it, she reminded me how to attach the aspirator to the cannula. I clamped down the two small locks on the end of the instrument, pulled the handle toward me to create suction, and eased it gently onto the plastic tube—I wasn’t going to be the one to perforate my papaya’s fundus.
“It’s even more satisfying when it’s a real abortion,” Thill said.
The point of papaya workshops isn’t necessarily to teach people how to perform an aspiration abortion at home. Thill said she wanted to educate people about what an abortion procedure entails—information she believes shouldn’t belong only to doctors—to help combat fear, misinformation, and stigma. “I just want to be clear that when you leave here you won’t be competent at providing abortions, so don’t go (expletive) crazy,” Thill said by way of disclaimer.
Zoey Thill, a New York City-based abortion provider, to Vice
Read the entire Vice article by clicking the link below:
Yikes! This gave me chills. A baby is not a papaya. Life begins at conception, and human life is sacred. Abortion is pretty close to murder, although I understand that those getting abortions and those performing them surely don't look at it that way, so it's not deliberately murder, and for that reason we who are opposed to abortion need to have some compassion for those caught up in it. To me, the most sickening part of it is the many abortion providers who are in it for the money, even to the extent of chopping the babies up and selling the parts, as Planned Parenthood does. It's a billion dollar industry, and a blight on our land.