The first paragraph of Meagan Jordan’s May 22 Rolling Stone profile of “abortion doula” Ash Williams is truly a masterpiece of clown-world propaganda:
In 2016, Ash Williams became pregnant for the first time. Williams wants to be a parent eventually — but he wasn’t ready for a child then. He didn’t know much about what an abortion entailed, and he needed a ride, so he called up a friend who drove him. When they got to the clinic, Williams, who is trans, remembers the people working there didn’t care enough to get his name right — using, instead, the name on his license. Never mind asking about pronouns. “Working with the actual provider was really f*****d up, too,” he says. “I just remember he didn’t say one word to me, and I felt sad about that.”
It’s all there, isn’t it? In a single paragraph, we have all of the most insane and insidious progressive views on display. There’s the fiction of the “pregnant man.” There’s the “pregnant man” getting an abortion — that is, a gender-dysphoric female having her child killed by an abortionist. There’s the fact that the abortion clinic staff is faulted not for facilitating feticide but for paying insufficient attention to pronouns.
In this world, killing a baby is fine — but forgetting to call a woman “he” because she identifies as transgender is truly wicked.
But fortunately, Jordan introduces a hero in paragraph two: “After the procedure, Williams’ friend, who also happens to be trans, took over. Without asking what Williams needed, his friend purchased Maxi Pads for aftercare bleeding and cooked him a pot of collard greens with ham hocks to combat the low iron levels the pregnancy caused.” This experience inspired Williams to become an “abortion doula.”
What is an abortion doula? As Jordan notes, a “doula” is usually someone “hired to give support and guidance during labor,” but that’s not what Williams does. Williams “supports patients who choose not to remain pregnant.” Which is to say, Williams assists people who are having their babies violently removed by “accompanying them to procedures and aiding in aftercare, ensuring they have medication and holistic outlets.” One aspect of her job includes fundraising for abortions on social media, which she does rather well.
The Williams profile manages to pervert language on nearly every level. “Abortion and birth often get siloed, and we’ve been made to think that these things are a binary, but they’re really not,” Williams informs Rolling Stone. “For me, abortion is a type of birth.” Which is true, so far as that goes. It’s just the birth of a baby that has been deliberately killed — but in the wake of Roe’s overturn, says Williams, this service is in increasingly high demand.
“As long as there’s people calling me and telling me they need an abortion and they need help, I’m going to do whatever I can,” Williams said. According to Rolling Stone, she “also hosts abortion-doula trainings throughout the country and virtually via Zoom … he (sic) has run seminars on gender justice since receiving an invitation from the abortion clinic where he (sic) had his second abortion, in 2018, to do training for staff.”
Perversely, Williams’ hope for a better world is … people who want to abort their babies. “People are still calling me, asking where to get help to have an abortion, and that’s the source of my hope: abortion seekers,” she told the Rolling Stone reporter, who, as it turns out, had just had her own abortion. Here’s the way Jordan describes their conversation:
On the Friday Williams and I first speak, it’s been a week since I’ve undergone my own abortion. “Congratulations,” he says, genuinely. It throws me off, but in a good way. He’s the first person to celebrate my process, and it feels affirming. “There’s not just sadness and grief, but there’s also so much relief and celebration,” says Williams, who had an abortion shower years after his own procedures. “I believe every person deserves to have the kind of abortion that they want to have, the kind of pregnancy that they want to have.
It’s a potent, eye-watering ending to a profile that manages to showcase everything wrong with our culture in 2024. “Pregnant men.” “Abortion showers.” For that matter, “abortion doulas.” Celebrating someone for an abortion (“Congratulations — it’s dead!”) People “deserve” abortion. It reminds me of a line from Proverbs 8: “All those who hate Me love death.”