A program at the University of California San Francisco (UCSF) trains students to commit abortion using various fruits like papayas and watermelons to allegedly simulate the procedure.

Innovating Education, a UCSF abortion training program by the Bixby Center for Global Reproductive Health, includes a “Papaya Workshop,” which uses Papayas to simulate abortion. It is designed to “engagingly teach[] manual vacuum aspiration, IUD placement, and other gynecologic skills, using papayas as uterine models.”

The website claims the Papaya Workshop, “uses a fun and inexpensive model to innovatively teach intrauterine procedures to health students or clinicians.”

The simulation is gaining traction in various places including New York City, where abortionist Zoey Thill described to a Vice reporter why the papaya is a desired simulator: “The narrow part of the papaya, where the stem would be, is like the cervix, she said. The broader portion of the papaya is like the upper area of the uterus known as the fundus—and it’s that part we would want to avoid puncturing with our tools when, in just a few minutes, we would practice performing an aspiration abortion on our own papayas.”

Thill stated to Vice after finishing the simulation, “It’s even more satisfying when it’s a real abortion.”

According to Vice, Thill, hoped “participants might capture some of the buoyant energy they felt while extracting seeds from fruits and use it to undo some of the seriousness and reverence we’ve placed around the procedure.” She also hoped to hold the events for “people providing underground abortions.”

UCSF’s Innovating Education program also suggests various melons to simulate later D&E abortion techniques. The simulation document demonstrates how training abortionists involves dehumanizing preborn children, stating how “learners extract a fetal model from a hollowed melon. The fetal calvarium is simulated with a clay-covered egg and limbs are simulated with dried pasta and pepperoni sticks (to reflect various stages of bone calcification). Mushroom is used to simulate placenta. Evaluation consists of complete fetal extraction.” [Editor’s note: image of fetal models made with pepperoni sticks in slideshow above].

But even UCSF knows there could be complications, so they have a solution. Since papayas don’t hemorrhage, the program recommends using pitaya (dragonfruit), which is supposed to train for “management of hemorrhage” because, according to TEACH documents, ” it is inexpensive, mimics the size, shape, and grittiness of a uterus, and is often red on the inside (mimicking blood).”

Full story at LiveAction.