Sound familiar? Similar to the BirthPartners (see my first edition of kick-ass radical doulas), another group in London is also providing support to women giving birth in prison. The organization, Birth Companions Organisation (BCO),

Birth Companions is a small charity providing practical and emotional support to women who face giving birth whilst in detention. Birth Companions provides trained and experienced birth supporters who support pregnant women in detention, during labour and after the birth of their babies. We work mainly in Holloway prison although we are now expanding to provide support in the community to pregnant asylum seekers/refugees who have been released from detention. We provide support to women who would not otherwise have anyone to accompany them during the birth of their baby. We also offer our support to women who are unsure whether their family or friend will be able to get to them in time to be with them during their labour.

So amazing and radical. Oh, and here’s more:

We do not discriminate against a mother in prison on grounds of race, culture, religious belief, sexual orientation, physical or mental disability, any social or behavioural disability, or on grounds of any offence she has committed or is alleged to have committed.

This organization has supported over 200 women in the last nine years, and interestingly enough, a quarter of the women in prisons in London are foreigners. We need more groups like these.

Check out their website for more information.

Check out my article at CampusProgress.org about being a radical doula.

Even though I am not currently practicing as a doula (due to the constraints of my full-time job), I recently was thrown back into the role of support person by my older brother’s appendicitis. It was incredible for me to see how similar my role with him was to my role with birthing women. The experience served to reinforce a few things for me:

1)    That all people, particularly when in the hospital setting and going through a medical procedure, deserve the support that someone like a doula can provide
2)    That hospitals and medical staff are not equipped/not able to provide this type of support to patients
3)    That I derive a lot of joy from serving in this capacity, and need to find a way to incorporate it into my life (in a sustainable way!)

My main experiences as a doula are from working in a public teaching hospital not too different from the one where my brother was—and it was amazing how the sites and smells just completely threw me back to those births. Particularly the smell of the soap served as a really strong memory trigger.

The other thing that I took away from this experience with my brother (who is doing quite well by the way!) is how important the role of pleasure can be in the treatment of sick people. Doctors and nurses mainly focus on the eradication of pain—primarily through the use of narcotics. This is a common critique of the treatment of birth, particularly because in childbirth pain can be an important indicator and way through which the body communicates. But when we are dealing with pain that is not really an indicator of anything (except maybe that someone cut your stomach open and sewed you back up), the focus becomes helping the patient to be as comfortable as possible. Naturally.

But in this focus on narcotics and pain eradication—an extremely effective technique can be forgotten—pleasure. Rather than focusing on making patients feel good—we focus on making them feel numb, feel nothing, feel no pain. I don’t know a lot about the physiology of pleasure and pain, but I know there are a lot of connections between the two, and sometimes quite a fine line between them. What I do know is that it is just as important to make sick people, and people in pain, feel good as it is to get rid of their pain. Doulas and midwives know this, and use it in their practice, employing massage, acupressure, and other techniques to make women in labor feel pleasure, which in turn mediates their pain, making it more tolerable.

Hospitals are strikingly devoid of these techniques, and patients are left to manage their pain through numbing narcotics. Other non-traditional practitioners employ these techniques (like massage therapists, acupuncturists, etc) but I think we need to bring it back into standard medical care.

So this is just a cheesy piece of gossip, but according to the Wilmington Star, actress Amy Pietz (best known for her role on Caroline in the City) is also a doula! Ok, so she wasn’t even the title character, and the show only ran for four seasons–but still! Yay for famous doulas.

Apparently she became interested in doula/midwifery work after her own experience giving birth at 23 and giving up the child for adoption. She then pursued being a doula as a back-up career for acting.

She is also this year’s Azalea Queen.

I attended another cool conference this weekend–sponsored by Civil Liberties and Public Policy Program and Hampshire College, it was called From Abortion Rights to Social Justice: The Fight for Reproductive Freedom.

“Do you know what you need?” A presenter on a panel about family creation shared this really powerful point in reference to social work–that we need to be asking this question constantly. I think this is a center piece of the doula/midwifery philosophy, and it is based in the idea that a person’s self-knowledge must be put at the center.

If we cannot ask what a woman wants, or ask if she knows what she needs, then we cannot begin to support her. It also emphasizes the idea that a person knows best what they need to improve their situation. Too frequently we come at these situations with our own agenda, or our own idea of what someone else needs, and do not do a good enough job of listening. Even doulas and midwives are guilty of this sometimes. Also this philosophy reinforces the idea that a woman should speak up with her desires and make demands, particularly in health care settings.

I think its a great slogan–let’s make some radical doula t-shirts (no making fun of my elementary photoshop artwork above).

The next few posts will be on things I heard there that sparked my thinking, so stay tuned.

I went to an awesome performance of the Vagina Monologues (the amazing play written by Eve Ensler) last night, which was a fundraiser to raise money for the NYC Gay and Lesbian Anti-Violence Project.

One particular monologue is written by Eve about witnessing the birth of her granddaughter. She begins the piece by admitting that her original version of the monologues had left out the subject of birth completely–something that her experience with her granddaughter helped her to reconcile.

Birth is obviously quite connected to our vaginas, but also our sexuality, a fact that I feel gets overlooked and purposely erased. Childbirth and sex? Childbirth and orgasms? Yup. You heard right. Need proof? Here it is:

The chemical that is produced when a person orgasms is called oxytocin. Both men and women release this hormone–but women also release it at another time: during labor. That’s right folks…the same chemical released during orgasm is also released during childbirth. It gives a whole new meaning to the idea of the pleasure/pain divide. Now I’m not trying to say that the majority of women, particularly in US hospitals, are orgasming during delivery. On the contrary–its probably a minority, and the women who do feel pleasure during the process probably feel ashamed or confused by these feelings, particularly in a culture where the overwhelming sentiment about childbirth is how horribly painful it is. There have even been cases of women whose children have been taken away for confessing feeling sexually aroused during breastfeeding.

Doctors, technology and medicines are also instrumental in wiping out this connection–how could anyone feel sexy in that environment? Not to mention that being numbed from the waist down by an epidural definitely isn’t going to help you cum.

The great thing about oxytocin is that it has also been shown to help with maternal/child bonding, as well as bonding between partners. “In the brain, oxytocin is involved in social recognition and bonding, and might be involved in the formation of trust between people.” Now that explains those post-coital feelings…  It is also secreted during breastfeeding and nipple stimulation.

I personally think that part of the reason that the sexuality of birth has been kept secret is that we as a society love to desexualize mothers. We cannot handle the idea of a mother as a sexual being (just think about how middle-aged women are portrayed) and are particularly frightened by any hint of a sexual connection between mother and child as it is automatically seen as incestuous.

An awesome group of midwives and doulas (including the woman who trained me!) are working on this topic, and even making a documentary about it. Check it out here.