doula for medicalized birth
It's kind of weird to be "announcing" important life decisions in the pregnant community, but I do have a question, so the backgroud is imporant.
Just last night, I finally decided that I will be taking a doula certification class this summer. It is inexpensive enough that even if I end up deciding that this line of work is not for me after all, I don't really feel like I will regret having tried. I am still pondering childcare issues, but that is a discussion for another time and place.
So, just when I have made up my mind to go for it, I find out that another mom at my son's preschool is pregnant. She isn't due until January, but I still mentioned that I am going to become a doula over the summer and will be looking for clients while I am in training. I also said that it would be free, because I know that she and her family are struggling financially and that if she didn't have a free doula, she wouldn't be having one at all.
She seemed pretty excited about the idea, though I could tell that her knowledge of what a doula really is and what she does is fairly limited ... ("I saw a woman on one of those pregnant tv shows had a doula and she like did massage and stuff. Is that what you'll do? That sounds amazing!" So I tried to briefly summarize that yes a doula can help with pain relief via massage and other techniques, but that she is also a support person and an advocate if needed.
The mom discussed that she had been under a midwife's care during her last pregnancy until she had to transfer to an OB because her baby turned out to be babies and multiple births are considered high risk and out of a midwife's scope of practice in our state.
All was going well, and I was about to refer her to my homebirth midwife, when I realized that she was talking about a completely different birth experience than I was envisioning. She wants a CNM-assisted hospital birth and she is already dreaming of her epidural.
This is not my personal philosophy of birth, but it obviously is not up to me. I feel that I can accept it a lot more if its the mother's desire to have pain medication, rather than hospital policies backing a natural-birth-desiring mother into a corner, making her feel like her body is inadequate or like there is some true medical reason that her labor needs multiple interventions.
tl;dr: Do you feel like a doula could still help a mother who was not interested in a natural birth? Or would she be unnessesary?
Did you have a doula AND an epidural? What did you doula do to support you in your labor? What did you like? What did you dislike?
Just last night, I finally decided that I will be taking a doula certification class this summer. It is inexpensive enough that even if I end up deciding that this line of work is not for me after all, I don't really feel like I will regret having tried. I am still pondering childcare issues, but that is a discussion for another time and place.
So, just when I have made up my mind to go for it, I find out that another mom at my son's preschool is pregnant. She isn't due until January, but I still mentioned that I am going to become a doula over the summer and will be looking for clients while I am in training. I also said that it would be free, because I know that she and her family are struggling financially and that if she didn't have a free doula, she wouldn't be having one at all.
She seemed pretty excited about the idea, though I could tell that her knowledge of what a doula really is and what she does is fairly limited ... ("I saw a woman on one of those pregnant tv shows had a doula and she like did massage and stuff. Is that what you'll do? That sounds amazing!" So I tried to briefly summarize that yes a doula can help with pain relief via massage and other techniques, but that she is also a support person and an advocate if needed.
The mom discussed that she had been under a midwife's care during her last pregnancy until she had to transfer to an OB because her baby turned out to be babies and multiple births are considered high risk and out of a midwife's scope of practice in our state.
All was going well, and I was about to refer her to my homebirth midwife, when I realized that she was talking about a completely different birth experience than I was envisioning. She wants a CNM-assisted hospital birth and she is already dreaming of her epidural.
This is not my personal philosophy of birth, but it obviously is not up to me. I feel that I can accept it a lot more if its the mother's desire to have pain medication, rather than hospital policies backing a natural-birth-desiring mother into a corner, making her feel like her body is inadequate or like there is some true medical reason that her labor needs multiple interventions.
tl;dr: Do you feel like a doula could still help a mother who was not interested in a natural birth? Or would she be unnessesary?
Did you have a doula AND an epidural? What did you doula do to support you in your labor? What did you like? What did you dislike?