The childbearing year is an important formative time for women, their babies and their families. It is not a coincidence that cultures across history and across the world have practiced special care for pregnant, birthing and newly postpartum mothers. These traditions are the root of the modern doula practice.
Birth doula support during pregnancy can help guide families in educating themselves and give them the confidence to make clear choices about what is an optimal birth experience for them. During birth, continuous labour support from a doula has been shown to enhance the physiological labour process and reduce the occurrence of unnecessary interventions. Here’s a summary of the research around this by Evidence Based Birth.
Women who hire doulas also report higher satisfaction with their birth experience. This is no small thing in a culture where so many women are left feeling disappointed, sad or traumatized by their births.
Birth doulas are trained to provide continuous one-on-one care including information, physical comfort and emotional support to birthing women and their families. We have no medical or clinical certification and do not give medical advice or perform clinical exams/monitoring. Instead we can nurture and support you with things like:
- Helping you find evidence-based information about your choices
- Helping to explain what is happening at each point during labour
- Facilitating positive communication with your medical team
- Helping you prepare a list of your birth preferences
- Helping you work through fears and self-doubt
- Soothing touch, or more importantly: showing your partner how to do
- this well
- Creating a calm and comfortable environment
- Keeping you (and your partner!) nourished and hydrated
- Spelling your partner off for breaks
- Physically supporting you to get around or maintain different positions
- Suggesting techniques in labour for coping and comfort
- Providing tools and supplies for a more comfortable labour
- Reassurance and encouragement
If you have midwifery care you can still benefit from a doula. In fact many midwives strongly encourage their clients to hire one. Your midwife’s main responsibility is the medical health of you and your baby and they will usually only join you for the later part of labour (active labour). When they are with you they’ll be attending to those medical tasks, charting, testing, etc. The doula’s job is to give you and your partner confidence and attentive support starting right from early labour through til post birth.
A doula does not replace your partner! Your partner is your number one support. A skilled doula will help them to best support you and handle logistical tasks so they can focus on being 100% present physically and emotionally for you. Plus, if they need to eat or go to the washroom, having a doula present means they don’t have to worry about leaving you alone!
I am a birth doula based in East Vancouver. I serve families mainly here in this neighbourhood but also all over Vancouver, in Burnaby as well as on the North Shore.
My practice is focused on helping people have positive and gentle births that are centred around birth as a physiological process rather than a medical procedure. The approach I take is practical, down-to-earth and packed with evidence-based information. I joke sometimes that my niche is “natural birth for non-hippies”!
In addition to my private doula practice I also teach prenatal classes through Dancing Star Birth.
If you’re pregnant I’d love to talk to you even more about how hiring a doula can benefit you and see if we click well to work together.
If you work with pregnant people I would be thrilled to connect with you to form more relationships with resources that might benefit my clients and share how what I do might be able to benefit some of yours.
You can contact me by email: jessicamedreabirth@gmail.com or check out my website www.jessicamedreabirth.com and instagram @jessicamedreabirth