I do indeed doula

It's not every day that you get to sit down at your blog and write that you have just passed what is probably one of the most important weekends of your life, but that's what I'm sitting down here to do.  I spent it out of town at a doula training workshop, which is one of the major milestones toward my certification as a birth doula through DONA.  The instructor, Robin Elise Weiss, was amazing, as was the experience of sitting in a room (and laughing and crying in a room) full of women also passionately committed to the birth experience and toward helping women fulfill their potential as birthing mothers.  The more I read, the more I come to believe that a woman's body is precision-designed for birth and that with the proper support, the overwhelming majority of pregnancies can end with natural birth.  That said, I also believe in birth as an experience of empowerment for a woman, and I see my role as a doula as helping every woman have the birth that will empower her, whether that be natural or otherwise.  I hope that, if better educated on the amazing potential of their bodies, women will begin to regain confidence in their ability to give birth and will feel comfortable choosing natural birth.  Although advances in medicine have made truly miraculous things possible when interventions are necessary, I think the medicalization of birth over the last few decades has done women a great disservice in that it has caused them to doubt their ability to birth normally and naturally.  The control of maternal care by obstetricians (who are, after all, trained surgeons) has forced a reframing of birth from a normal, natural event to one where the process is seen primarily from the viewpoint of pathology, where the potential for disaster is a constant, shadowy companion.  Women have been stripped of their power and have instead become patients in a system that treats them as if they were ill and not on the brink of one of life's most awesome and transformative rites of passage.  The female body is seen as defective, not normative, and seldom able to deliver a baby without medical assistance.  I'm not asserting that these are the active thoughts of most doctors, but these beliefs do underly the culture in which medicine is taught and practiced.  It's shocking to me that most obstetricians leave medical school without ever having seen a normal birth, so how can we truly fault them for believeing that women need help delivering their babies?  And is it any wonder, then, that we have such an astronomical rate of intervention in the US and such a shameful rate of maternal and fetal mortality that can be directly attributed to those interventions?

As a doula, I hope to do my part to change the culture of birth in this country through education and through honoring the strength and potential of birthing women.  Doulas also have an important role to play as birth attendants in hospitals, where staff shortages and charting obligations keep nurses from spending a significant amount of time with labor support duties.

It's hard to believe that I am now qualified to go out and start working as a doula, but I still feel as though I need a lot more preparation before I am ready for my own clients.  I'm now looking for a mentor, with whom I hope to spend some time shadowing and getting some on-the-job training.  And of course there's one of the greatest ur-mentors of all time - Ina May Gaskin, from whom I am constantly learning.

So... a momentous beginning, the first steps taken on a road whose destination is still unknown to me.

Here are a couple great videos on doulas and what they do: