Doulas!

I am thinking very seriously about hiring a doula for my upcoming birth in September. I was doing a little reading up on what a doula does during labor,  and I found this short 14-minute documentary from Dona International:



I was most intrigued at the assertion that 100 years ago, the average woman would have witnessed many other people's births before going through her own. How great would it be if childbirth became demystified, no longer solely the realm of doctors, but a regular part of life?  In fact, knowing that made me feel a little cheated. It would have been so helpful for me. I can only imagine how enlightening it would have been to have that corpus of experience before going into labor myself, and how comforting it would have been to have not just the hospital nurses, but a whole team of women supporting me during the contractions. I am grateful for many of the advances in modern medical care (blood transfusions, antibiotics, and so on) but I am sad that we got all that at the expense of turning birth into an ordeal.

The last three generations of women in my family all had very hard, difficult births (when they were conscious for them), so naturally I was raised to think that childbirth was something painful and horrible to be feared, not to mention supremely dangerous. In my experience, I discovered that childbirth has the potential to be none of those things. It's not my family's fault that it was like that - the nature of the obstetric care to which they had access to made it inevitable. But I would like to break the cycle, all the same.

My feelings echo the parting remarks of the documentary. If everyone could have a positive birth experience, imagine how that could change society as a whole for the better. Having children would be seen as more positive, women would feel more confident and empowered, and it could even strengthen families. Cool, huh?