A New York City abortion clinic has been holding workshops which aim to teach members of the public how to perform a termination.
Using a papaya fruit to mimic the uterus, abortionist Zoey Thill guided her class through a step-by-step aspiration abortion procedure.
VICE (glowingly) documented the process in horrifying detail. Though this is only being done to a papaya fruit, it still gives an insight into the absolutely brutal, cold and heartless method used to snuff out little lives on a daily basis:
“Thill brought us to a long table across the room, where several Hawaiian papayas were lined up on surgical pads. After telling us about the tools that were laid out—plus the ones she didn’t have with her, the speculum and tenaculum—Thill demonstrated a first-trimester abortion on the papaya she’d displayed earlier. She talked to the “patient” throughout, checking in on how they were doing as she inserted a finger into the “cervix,” then pantomimed inserting the speculum; she pretended to apply the local anesthetic and then began inserting the metal tapered rods on the table one by one to dilate the opening.
When the papaya was fully “dilated,” she 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.”
Despite the sordid method being displayed, as the students finished up, the instructor went on to declare that it is “even more satisfying when it’s a real abortion.”
Through the running of these hands-on workshops, Thill noted her desire to
“combat fear, misinformation, and stigma” surrounding abortion. Ironically, it is unlikely that the unfettered exterminating of young lives will gain more supporters after the true, grizzly nature of the procedure has been rightfully exposed through exercises like this one.
While Thill made it clear that this was not, necessarily, a class for people who were thinking about performing an at-home abortion, she did express her desire to host an event to help train people who are providing “underground” abortion services.
The Reproductive Health Access Project (RHAP) has been offering these classes for a number of years to shatter the mystery regarding what an abortion procedure actually entails.
“We see it as a strategy to start a really honest conversation about what abortion is and isn’t, and destigmatize it,” RHAP’s Executive Director, Lisa Maldonado, told VICE. “The papaya workshop helps us do that in a really concrete way, usually in a small group setting where we can answer whatever questions people have.”
As for Thill, she hopes that the demonstrations will encourage people to ditch the term “surgical abortion” in exchange for “procedural abortion,” when it comes to describing late-term abortions. Why? Because “it makes it sound way more dramatic than it needs to be,” she said.
In reality, what could be more dramatic than the brutal murder of a human child, followed by the suctioning out of it’s mangled remains?