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Month: December 2009
Radical Doula Profiles: Nicole Murray
Nicole is a labor doula and a mother of two young children. She currently resides in Newberg, Oregon, with plans in the near future to buy and live aboard a sailboat in Portland, along with cruising the world with her family (all while hopefully remaining a doula)! You can learn more about Nicole at her website.
RD: What inspired you to become a doula?
NM: When I was pregnant with my second child, I was planning an unassisted birth. I read and studied as much as I could, learning about all kinds of birth options. I did not have very many family or friends who fully supported me through that pregnancy, and I realized that I wanted to be there for women, no matter what their choices were. I think every woman deserves to have that.
RD: What is your Doula philosophy and how does it fit into your broader political beliefs?
NM: I am there to serve a woman and her family in whatever way is needed. Every birth is different, and as a doula, I know it is my role to support, respect and listen to each woman. I go in with no plans, or desires to mold the birth into what I deem right. In the same sense, I am very liberal in my own life choices, and believe that every person deserves the right to choose what kind of life they want to live.
RD: What is your favorite thing about being a Doula?
NM: I love the excitement of birth. Coming into a home where a mother is laboring, it almost feels electric. You are apart of this amazing experience that forever bonds you with these people. It totally fills me up with happiness unlike anything else.
RD: If you could change one thing about birth in the US, what would it be?
NM: That homebirth would be more accessible to every woman, no matter her means. I wish that all insurance companies would cover homebirths, and that those who choose to have one would be encouraged rather than being continually dissuaded.
Rebecca Project’s Malika Saada Saar profiled in the Washington Post
A long profile of Malika Saada Saar is in the Washington Post last week. She is the founder and Executive Director of the Rebecca Project, whose work on fighting the shackling of pregnant women I’ve written about here before. From the article:
In 2001, while studying at Georgetown University Law Center, she founded the Rebecca Project, which took its name from the biblical figure, as well as a beloved Washington-based mentor of Saada Saar’s named Rebecca Rice. The organization grew out of workshops that encouraged addicts to seek healing through poetry and other forms of artistic expression. In the Rebecca Project’s infancy, Saada Saar and Imani Walker, a mother of four who was recovering from addiction to crack cocaine, shared a single donated desk in the Washington Law Clinic.
One piece that particularly emphasizes The Rebecca Project’s work:
…A core Saada Saar philosophy: It is wrongheaded to incarcerate women whose troubled circumstances have led to drug addiction or prostitution, especially those who have been sexually abused, instead of steering them to treatment options.”The pipeline that channels vulnerable young girls from cradle to sexual abuse to prison must be completely dismantled,” she writes.
The work that they do is going to be crucial to reversing the frightening trend of over-incarceration in this country, which we now serves much much more harm than good.
You can learn more about the Rebecca Project for Human Rights on their website.
Radical Doula Profiles: Aya de Chellis
Aya de Chellis is a radical queer Reproductive Justice freedom-fighter. As a doula she is available to listen and share ideas and comfort techniques that would be helpful to any person. The communities that Aya most often works with are young people, communities of color, Spanish-speaking Latina immigrant women and their families, refugee communities, and LGBTQ people. Primarily, she teaches Lamaze, attends births, and attends abortions, but also goes with people as a support person to get STI testing and treatment. She wants you to remember that you are your own expert and have many valuable tools within yourself. She lives, works, and loves in Pittsburgh, PA and is proud to be from the Rustbelt. She can be reached at aya.doula@gmail.com.
What inspired you to become a Doula?
I became a doula because I believe in girls and women, and I believe in Reproductive Justice. We have no choice if we don’t know what our choices are. For years I did work in abortion advocacy, and now most of my time is spent in pregnancy and birth care. For a number of women that I work with, I have attended both their births and their abortions. The same problems exist across the spectrum of medical care: girls and women are too often treated like they don’t know their own bodies, like they don’t know what’s best for them, and like they need medical intervention to “correct” a “problem.” I want all people to know that their experiences, their wishes, and their truth matters.
What is your favorite thing about being a Doula?
I love being able to create a space for a person to realize their own innate ability to take care of themselves. Moments when someone realizes that they naturally move a certain way or breathe a certain way for comfort and rhythm is amazingly powerful. Environment is everything, and if people are in spaces where they see negative images of themselves or people like them, if they are discouraged, or if they are distracted and stressed out, they can’t feel powerful and capable. Clearing a space and guarding it for someone is an awesome responsibility that I take very seriously and enjoy immensely.
If you could change one thing about birth in the US, what would it be?
I want to stop the inaccurate portrayal of birth and replace it with evidence-based information and true stories of physiological natural birth. One of the most dangerous things to birth is the constant representation in media of how scary and dangerous giving birth is. Starting in early childhood, we all swim in the notion that it is something to be feared and something that can go terribly wrong without a doctor’s supervision. Imagine how different our culture(s) would be if, instead, we heard stories and saw representations of natural homebirth, orgasmic birth, squatting birth, and fierce bellowing birthing mamas as the norm.
Are you a French-speaking midwife or doula?
Lynn Paltrow, Executive Director of National Advocates for Pregnant Women, is looking for US based progressive and French-speaking midwives or doulas. She has a colleague working on a project called Middle Africa Network for Women’s Reproductive Rights: Gabon, Cameroon, Equatorial Guinea.
If you are this midwife, or know of someone, you can email Lynn at lmp@advocatesforpregnantwomen.org.
Lynn just informed me that a doula would work as well, so if you’re a French-speaking doula, contact Lynn!
Volunteer Program Spotlight: The Doula Project (NYC)
I’ve written about The Doula Project before. They used to use the name, The Abortion Doula Project, and Mary Mahoney, one of the founders, was featured in a Radical Doula Profile.
I wanted to highlight their project again because it’s awesome, but also because they just launched a new and expanded website.
I’m proud to say I was a founding member of the Doula Project. While things really got started after I had stopped working directly with the other two founders (due to a move away from NYC) I’m so proud to be connected to them, even in a small way. Their work truly is amazing and has grown so much since those initial conversations.
After one year, we have served over 500 women in the NYC area. In 2010, we will expand our service to at least 2 more NYC clinics to serve women having abortions or experiencing fetal loss, at least 1 hospital/organization to serve women giving birth, and support and train at least 2 affiliate organizations in the U.S.
Their tagline, “supporting people across the spectrum of pregnancy,” really says it all. What is so radical about their work is that they take the concept of a doula to it’s logical end–supporting folks throughout all their reproductive choices: birth, abortion and adoption.
Check out their website here. Congrats Doula Project!
Grit.tv takes on birth politics
There is a great segment on Grit.tv about childbirth in the US, featuring Debra Pascali-Bonaro (my doula trainer!) of the Orgasmic Birth documentary.
“The Bellevue Hospital Natural Birth center in Manhattan, one of the few centers that cater not to the wealthy but to poor women, closed this month amid controversy. With the ongoing debate about health care reform and costs, decisions about childbirth are getting lost in the shuffle. We discuss the closing of the birth center and the medicalization of childbirth with Katherine Abelson, midwife at the Brooklyn Birthing Center, Elan McAllister, doula and president and founder of Choices in Childbirth, and Debra Pascali-Bonaro, doula and director and producer of Orgasmic Birth.”
Full video after the jump!
Radical Doula Profiles: Michelle Bell
The newest in the Radical Doula Profiles series is Michelle Bell!
If you’re interested in being part of the profile series here at Radical Doula, email me.
About Michelle:
I currently run a private practice where I am part of a collective (Ann Arbor Doulas). I also offer volunteer services as a postpartum and birth doula for the non-profit Doulas Care in addition to working as the Client Intake Coordinator. Doulas Care is committed to supporting, educating and empowering childbearing women and their families, and specifically exists to help women and adolescents with limited resources. If you’re receiving WIC assistance and are living in South Michigan or Metro-Toledo area and are currently pregnant, please contact us if you would like to explore the option of a doula. When I’m not attending births or working at the office, I escort at the local Planned Parenthood and write at the Gaytheists blog.
If you live in the Ann Arbor, Detroit Metro, Saginaw & Bay City area or Toledo area and are looking for doula services, please e-mail me! I can be reached at Michelle -at- annarbordoulas -dot- com and will return any inquiries within 24 hours.
Keep reading to learn more about Michelle!
Volunteer Program Spotlight: Family Health and Birth Center, Washington DC
In order to highlight the work of the great volunteer doula programs around the country, I’m going to have guest posts from folks involved with those programs to talk about their work. The first guest post comes from Katie Daily, who coordinates the volunteer program at the Family Health and Birth Center in Washington DC.
I’ve actually recently gotten involved with the program and am inspired by the diversity of the doulas involved and their passion for birth activism. Thanks to Katie for the guest post!
Here’s Katie:
“…having a doula there was my balance. I was still taking care of my family, and their needs, my doula was there to take care of me.”- Kari, FHBC mother of two
Family Health and Birth Center follows the DONA International mission of “a doula for every woman who wants one.” Located in the Brentwood neighborhood of Washington, DC, FHBC provides multidisciplinary health care in a social context by building on the existing strengths of the families being served. A team of midwives, nurse practitioners, community health workers, and administrative staff work together to achieve impressive clinical outcomes. Success is evident by low rates of preterm birth, low birth weight, and cesarean section as compared to those of similar families in the District.
Doulas provide continuous physical, emotional, and informational support the mother before, during, and just after childbirth. Many of our doulas volunteer their services through an on-call calendar, while others are contracted to provide intensive long-term relationships to pregnant women at-risk for preterm labor. These dual programs ensure that FHBC can offer doula support to all women in our care. Doula care complements the individualized, evidence-based care offered by midwives.
In the first half of 2009, our doulas attended over 50 births, providing almost 400 hours of labor support – mostly on a volunteer basis. Our volunteers area diverse group of women dedicated to supporting birthing families. FHBC offers continuing education and mentoring opportunities to these often new, student doulas. In the future we hope to recruit and train more women from the community to serve as doulas.
Bellevue shuts down birth center for low-income women
Word got out a few weeks ago that Bellevue, a hospital in Manhattan (New York City) was shutting down their in-hospital birth center which was opened in 1998. It was the only birth center in Manhattan to accept Medicaid, and probably one of the few around the country serving low-income women.
The center gave healthy women the opportunity to give birth in a comfortable environment absent the frenetic bustle of a normal hospital delivery ward. Roughly 85 percent of the patients were Chinese- or Spanish-speaking immigrants, most of them referred though Gouverneur Healthcare Services on the Lower East Side. (All midwives were required to be fluent in either Mandarin or Spanish.)
The center allowed healthy expecting mothers to walk around, bathe in a Jacuzzi as a way to reduce pain naturally, and choose to forgo common but invasive medical techniques like induced labor and epidural blocks. Unlike women who chose natural birth at home, patients had immediate access to hospital facilities if there were complications.
Fans of the birth center said that it had a Caesarean rate of less than 4 percent over its lifetime; the hospital said that such a statistic was not available.
According to the NY Times, the closing was done secretively and without much notice to the public or even the hospital advisory board. While economics was cited as the reason for the closure, this flies in the face of the information about how the birth center reduced interventions (and cost) for women who delivered there.
I think this is just further proof that most hospitals don’t care that much about outcomes or patient satisfaction–they care about money. Rumor is that the birth center will be leased out for some other purpose (generating revenue via rent or the income of whatever facility they install).
Here’s the financial math that I think is insidious and behind this kind of decision:
While you would think it’s a good thing that these patients were having births that were much less expensive (because of lower interventions and c-sections), it actually means the hospital loses revenue. Why? Because they don’t have as much to bill Medicaid for, meaning less money for the hospital.
What does that mean? Our current system of health care (which is primarily profit driven) doesn’t result in the best care for women, or their children. It’s the same logic that has created our health care system which spends way more per capita than any other country in the world, but has relatively bad outcomes.
In 2002, the United States spent $5,267 per capita on health care—53 percent more than Switzerland, the next-highest-spending country, and 140 percent more than the median OECD country.
Want to try and get the Bellevue Birth Center back? Sign this petition by Choices in Childbirth.
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