As part of my new and expanded site, the page about becoming a doula (still in progress!) has a list of volunteer doula programs at the bottom. Here is my list so far is after the jump.
Do you know of other programs I should feature here at radical doula? If so leave them in comments or send them to me via email. International programs welcome.
“Because the Physicians at Aspen Women’s Center care about the quality of their patient’s deliveries and are very concerned about the welfare and health of your unborn child, we will not participate in a “Birth Contract”, a Doulah Assisted, or a Bradley Method delivery. For those patients who are interested in such methods, please notify the nurse so we many arrange transfer of your care.”
Translation: We don’t care at all what you want as a parent, or a person in labor. We want a patient who will sit quiet and do what we say–no matter what. Oh and if you have a partner you want involved, tough. Your desires don’t matter.
Oh, and we don’t even care enough about doula’s to bother spelling the word correctly.
They should change the name of the center to the “Unborn Children Center” since they don’t seem to care too much about the women involved.
I hope this keeps plenty of women away from this clinic. Ridiculous.
After much work and thinking, including the talents of Sinclair Sexsmith and Jill Raney, Radical Doula finally has a new look! I’ve been working on this since the two year anniversary of the blog and am happy to see it finally done.
A few new elements:
A “Becoming a Doula” resource page: I often get emails from people interested in becoming doulas, so this page is meant to be a starting place for learning about trainings and volunteer doula programs. If you know of a program or organization I didn’t list–email it to me and I’ll add it!
Radical Doula Profiles page: This is a series I’ve been doing for a while, but wanted a place to collect all of the awesome radical doula’s that have been featured here. Are you a radical doula? Email me to be featured on this site.
Updated and slimmed-down blogroll: I revised my blogroll extensively. I was overwhelmed trying to keep up with the broad categories, so I’ve decided to focus on birth and doula blogs. A number on my old list hadn’t been updated in over six months so I took them down. Know a great blog, or author one that relates to doulas/birth? Email me and I’ll add it to my list.
An actual logo!: The logo is courtesy of Sinclair Sexsmith, an awesome blogger and graphic designer. We put a lot of thought into creating something that would represent the feel of this site and what I’m trying to do here. I struggled with how to represent the work of doula’s visually. In the end I choose to rely on the commonly used image of the pregnant belly. It was not without recognizing that pregnant women are often represented by just a belly, and that it can be strange and disembodying, particularly in advertising. The main reason I chose to use the silhouette of only the belly was that I wanted something which wasn’t particularly gendered–I struggle often with using the super gendered language of pregnancy and birth and wanted a logo that didn’t denote this gendered nature.
Thanks to everyone who has read this site, emailed me with their stories and commented or contributed. You’ve all made this passion project more enjoyable than I could ever have imagined, and made me feel supported by a large community of radical doula’s out there.
I first saw this story over at Unnecesearan, and I’m happy to say that by the time I got to posting about it, some resolution was reached.
You can see a video of the news coverage, but basically a baby in the 99th percentile for size was denied coverage by a health insurance company.
Thanks to a ton of news coverage (possibly fueled by the father’s job as a newscaster in Colorado) the insurance company has reversed it’s policy. The company called it a flaw, but we all know that these kind of denials are pervasive and not going to go away on their own.
Yesterday, a victory from the folks at the National Advocates for Pregnant Women.
This case is pretty horrific. You can see more about Nelson’s story in the RH Reality Check video above. More info:
On Friday, the United States Court of Appeals for the Eight Circuit (the federal level appellate court that reviews decisions from federal district courts in North Dakota, South Dakota, Iowa, Nebraska, Missouri, Minnesota, and Arkansas) issued the long-awaited decision in Nelson v. Norris. In this case, Shawanna Nelson argued that being forced to go through the final stages of labor with both legs shackled to her hospital bed was cruel and unusual punishment, in violation of the 8th Amendment to the Constitution. She argued that she should be allowed to sue the director of the prison and the guard who repeatedly re-shackled her legs to the bed. Ms. Nelson, an African-American woman, was incarcerated for non-violent offenses of credit card fraud and “hot checks.”
The idea of shackling any person during labor is abominable, but in this case the one argument for the practice is bunk. The only argument I can think of (which I definitely don’t agree with) is that an incarcerated person could be “dangerous” and therefore need to be restrained, even while giving birth. It’s ludicrous for even the most “violent” of criminals, let alone a woman like Nelson, who was incarcerated for CREDIT CARD FRAUD. Absurd.
Last year I wrote about how Gardasil, the relatively new HPV vaccine, had been added to the list of required vaccines for people seeking to adjust their immigration statuses.
Numerous immigration groups came out in opposition to this requirement, stating that it posed a unfair financial barrier to immigrant women, who already take on a lengthy and costly process to become citizens.
Well now one of the first reported cases of a young woman losing her path to citizenship because of Gardasil, via ABC.
For the last near decade, Davis has embarked on a quest to get Simone U.S. citizenship. Now 17 and an aspiring elementary school teacher and devout Christian, Simone has only one thing standing in the way of her goal — the controversial vaccine Gardasil. Immigration law mandates that Simone get the vaccine to protect against the sexually transmitted human papillomavirus, which has been linked to cervical cancer. But Simone, who has taken a virginity pledge and is not sexually active, doesn’t see why she should have to take the vaccine, especially since it’s been under fire recently regarding its safety. And none of her American classmates is mandated by law to be vaccinated. “I am only 17 years old and planning to go to college and not have sex anytime soon,” said Simone. “There is no chance of getting cervical cancer, so there’s no point in getting the shot.”
The New York Times last week had an article about a clinic in rural Peru that was able to draw more women in by using traditional childbirth practices.
When the women were asked why they didn’t want to give birth at the local clinic, they explained what all of us birth activists know well: they didn’t want to give birth alone, on a table, with providers who didn’t speak their language.
They started by asking people in the community about traditional ways of giving birth, and about what the clinic was doing wrong. They got an earful. Workers at the clinic did not speak the local language, Quechua. They treated patients brusquely, and barred husbands and other relatives from the delivery room. They forced women to wear hospital gowns instead of their own clothes, and made them give birth lying on a table instead of squatting. They threw away the placenta instead of giving it to the family to bury in a warm place.
We know these things. The women is this community were lucky, because the providers had to change their habits to meet their desires–because the women just weren’t coming to their clinic.
Working with local people, members of a nongovernmental group, Health Unlimited, changed delivery services at a clinic in the Santillana district. They made sure Quechua was spoken, let relatives stay and help, set up delivery rooms so that women could squat and made other changes based on local traditions.
By 2007, 83 percent of births were taking place at the clinic. In a report in this month’s Bulletin of the World Health Organization, the authors say that the project in Ayacucho shows that indigenous women with little formal education want professional help giving birth, and will use it if they are treated with respect at clinics.
Why are we building clinics and funding initiatives that have women’s desires and needs as an afterthought? Maybe stories like these will start to change the paradigm, cause the current model really sucks.
h/t to Maria Elena for the link
I’m really excited to share the news that Jennie Joseph’s new midwifery school, Commonsense Childbirth School of Midwifery, is opening this Winter in Central Florida, near Orlando.
I got the chance to meet Jennie Joseph recently and she is really fantastic. She has a down-to-earth no nonsense approach to birth care, with an important focus on low-income women and women of color. What she does works–it really has transformed outcomes in her community.
We need more midwives, and that means we need more midwifery schools. Yay!
Ugh. That’s how I feel everytime I get another press release from the Big Push for Midwives, or see another blog post from a doula or midwifery blog about what ACOG–the American College of Obstetrics and Gynecology is up to. Just ugh. The latest: a totally biased segment on the Today show. To be honest, I couldn’t bring myself to watch it. If you want to see for yourself, it’s here.
Oh, and then there was the internet campaign to get stories about the “problem” of desire for out of hospital births. And before that was when they announced they would “allow” women in labor to drink modest amounts of clear liquids, but no food.
They’ve already GOT A MONOPOLY on birth in the US. 99 freaking percent of women are giving birth in the hospitals they control. That’s not enough apparently, because they are afraid. They are scared of all of us, of all the folks out there who are catching on about a different way to be, about how they can escape the hospital and reclaim some autonomy. They’re afraid of the 1% of women who have caught on, who give birth outside the hospital and away from their surgeons.
Still, because they are scared and they are more worried about the professional interests of doctors than the desires of their patients, they continue with their smear campaigns. The one thing that gives me comfort is that their fear is an indicator of our power. So let’s use it folks. People are catching on, and that is real.
The one positive thing that ACOG did recently was admit that their practices–which they say are fueled by fear of being sued–“ultimately hurt patients.” I would say that’s not the whole story, ACOG, but I will give you that our litigious society (and crappy doctor/patient relationship with little trust) makes things worse. Jill at Unnecesarean has more on this, but I would just add that midwives are also suffering from this litigious society and the fear of being sued. Often it’s not even the parents they care for who sue them–but local doctors who disagree with their practices. You can read about one of these midwives in my piece in The American Prospect. Again, she took this one doctor’s fear of her and turned it into action–helping to pass legislation in April to legalize the practice of CPMs there.
Radical Doula 