Birth Doesn't Have To Be Filled With Fear
Birth is beautiful and it doesn't have to be filled with fear. One of the greatest blessings in birth is the courage you can feel doing something strong, something life-giving, and something so full of love.
Yet, sometimes this courage is stripped away by the medical environment of some doctors and hospitals. For the sake of efficiency and liability, both of which are indeed important, the comfort of mom and baby are compromised. With the rise of hospital care and select anesthesia, pregnancy is treated as medical condition even if both mom and baby are completely healthy throughout the duration of the pregnancy and birth. This has effected the cultural norms around pregnancy and made the entire process appear to be a high stress situation, where expertise and intervention is needed every time, and where mom has little control over what is happening to her body.
This is simply not the case.
Women have been giving birth since the beginning of time, and up until the last few hundred years, this has been without the help of medication, medical personnel, or intervention. While there are many, many reasons to rejoice over the advancing medical field that we now have access to, there are parts of pregnancy and birth that need to be given back to the mother.
As your birth doula, we are here to help with that. Our desire is to help you feel educated about what is going on with your body and your baby throughout your entire pregnancy, labor, delivery, and postpartum period. Education can calm a lot of fears and empower you to know what is going on, how to react to it, and how to help your body and your baby to thrive in the midst of your birth experience.
Birth is completely natural, and many births have no medical need for intervention or augmentation. This is something you are capable of, you are strong enough, and you are brave enough. With the right support from your birth team and your birth doula, you can have a confident and graceful birth.
If there was one reason to make sure you have a birth doula on your team, it would be this: the presence of a birth professional can lower moms blood pressure, ease fears, create an environment of peace and calm, encourage mom with an experienced voice of assurance, and offer holistic support that transforms your experience of birth — enriching it with education, confidence, and grace.
