A taxpayer-funded public university in North Carolina hosted a weekend training camp to certify teenagers as young as 14 to become “abortion doulas.” UNC Charlotte opened its doors to the Youth Abortion Support Collective so that kids who can’t legally buy a lottery ticket or get a tattoo could spend 14 hours learning how to “spiritually hold space” for women getting abortions.
Spiritually hold space! These kids can’t even hold their attention span through a geometry class, but sure, let’s have them shepherd strangers through the termination of a pregnancy. What could go wrong?
The training, which took place over two days in November, was aimed at “young people ages 14–24” and was promoted on Instagram by Advocates for Youth, a Washington, DC-based nonprofit with over $11 million in assets and cozy partnerships with Planned Parenthood. The group’s curriculum partner, an outfit called Dopo, helpfully defines an abortion doula as “anyone that can physically, emotionally, and/or spiritually hold space for someone before, during, and/or after abortion.”
Dopo’s website also proudly declares that they “love abortion” and “make playlists along the way.” They literally made a Spotify playlist for their training cohort. Nothing says “sacred spiritual support work” like a curated playlist. Maybe they can add “Oops!… I Did It Again” to the queue.
Here’s the kicker — abortion doulas require zero medical training. None. The role is completely unregulated. Nobody tracks how many of these people exist or what they actually do. But some of them charge between $200 and $800 per client for their unregulated, untrained “services.” Not a bad gig for a high schooler who just got her learner’s permit.
And the program doesn’t just train these kids to be doulas. It encourages them to go back to their schools and train other kids using a facilitator guide with lesson plans and activities. So a 14-year-old completes a weekend crash course and then becomes a certified instructor of abortion support at her middle school. We’re not making this up.
When pressed for comment about the event, UNC Charlotte trotted out the most predictable response imaginable. A university spokesperson told Fox News Digital that the school is “a marketplace of ideas” and that they “remain neutral on the diverse social and political points of view expressed by the more than 450 registered student organizations on our campus.”
A marketplace of ideas! That’s rich. We’d love to see how “neutral” UNC Charlotte would remain if a student organization hosted a 14-hour pro-life training weekend for eighth graders. Something tells us the “marketplace” would be closed for renovations that particular Saturday.
Advocates for Youth — the group behind this whole operation — isn’t exactly a newcomer to the “let’s get to the children” game. They condemn parental notification laws. They oppose the Hyde Amendment, which prevents your federal tax dollars from directly funding abortions. In 2022, one of their senior staffers claimed that children as young as three could be transgender. They also wrote the sex education curriculum for Baltimore City Public Schools, which teaches first graders about genitalia and fourth graders about “sexual confusion.”
The group is bankrolled by the Susan Thompson Buffett Foundation, the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, and the James H. Clark Charitable Foundation. So billionaire money flows into a DC nonprofit, which partners with Planned Parenthood, which then sends trainers into a public university to recruit teenagers as unpaid abortion activists. Your tuition and tax dollars provide the building.
Monica Cline, a former Planned Parenthood sex educator who eventually saw the light and became a pro-life advocate, nailed it: “The abortion industry uses student peer education to bypass adult supervision.” She pointed out that terms like “peer support” and “comprehensive sex education” sound warm and fuzzy, but the goal is always the same — cut the parents out of the equation and get directly to the kids.
Meanwhile, in the mountains of North Carolina, the related Mountain Area Abortion Doula Collective has posted on its website that it “stands unequivocally in support of Palestine and against the forces of Israeli genocide, Zionism and apartheid.” Because naturally, an abortion doula group in Asheville has a foreign policy platform. They also demand that clients accept that “their doula may be a different race, sexual orientation, gender identity, or religious affiliation from them.” So tolerant. So brave.
Let’s take a step back here. A 14-year-old in North Carolina cannot vote, cannot enlist in the military, cannot consent to a tattoo, cannot buy cigarettes, cannot rent a car, cannot sign a legal contract, and cannot watch an R-rated movie without a parent. But she can spend a weekend at a public university getting certified to coach other girls through abortions and then go recruit her classmates into the program.
We used to have a word for adults who deliberately circumvent parental authority to pull children into sexually charged situations. Now we just call them “advocates” and hand them a tax exemption.
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