Remember: Your birth belongs to YOU! Make decisions that fit for you and yours. Birthing women birth best where they feel safest. Choose a team you trust to make you feel safe and to protect your birthing space. Make sure you are buying what members of your team are selling. Does she/he “do” birth the way you want your birth done?

Childbirth Educator

• Independent childbirth educators provide information that is not permitted in classes provided in hospitals
• Provides information to aid you in making decisions as you prepare for your birth
• Serves as a resource as you assemble your birth team
• Presents a wide range of options and possibilities so that you can make informed choices
• Helps you know where to start: what questions to ask, what qualifications to look for
• Provides personalized guidance in a forum designed to empower you with information

 

Doula (AKA: Professional Labor Support, Birth Doula)

• Provides physical and emotional support during pregnancy and labor
• Provides guidance as you prepare for your birth
• Serves as a sounding board to help you determine what options are in your best interest, during both pregnancy and labor
• Attends both a woman and her partner during labor, providing physical, psychological and emotional support
• Serves as an advocate to help a couple get the birth they want
• Offers alternatives to cookie-cutter birth scenarios, helping couples make choices that are right for them
• Accepts responsibility for logistical duties during labor (monitoring positioning, hydration, elimination, fetching, and maintenance of birth space) so that partners are free to simply be present and attentive

 

Midwife

• Attends births at home, birth centers and in hospitals
• Expert in normal birth
• Recognizes wide range of normalcy
• Sees birth as a healthy function of a healthy woman
• Catches babies, mothers deliver their own babies
• Provides personalized care, longer visits, and emphasis on a woman’s total well-being, including emotional and psychological aspects of pregnancy and labor
• Expects women to share responsibility and accountability for their own care
• William (M.D.) and Martha (R.N.) Sears say that midwives trust nature (your body’s ability to birth) and want to use intervention judiciously only if it becomes necessary

 

Obstetrician

• Attends births only in hospitals
• Expert in the pathology of birth (in things that can go wrong)
• Sees birth as a medical event requiring medical services
• Delivers babies
• Visits primarily emphasize objective measures of well-being; Psychological issues are often not acknowledged or addressed
• Sometimes expects women to relinquish responsibility, accountability and power over their own care
• William and Martha Sears say that obstetricians trust technology and are wary of nature

 

Postpartum Doula

• Provide support and encouragement to mothers and fathers as the family adjust to its newest member
• Performs light housekeeping tasks and meal preparation
• Helps parents become familiar and comfortable with care of their newborn
• Some postpartum doulas are prepared to help with breastfeeding and breastfeeding issues