Doulas are not wannabe midwives!

Doulas and birth keepers are not wannabe midwives!

It’s a statement that I’ve had thrown at me many times over the last 10 years of being in the birth space. “You just want to be a midwife!”

Well no - not really - not at all in fact in the current sense.

I don’t want to work in a system that fails to treat people as individuals, doesn’t provide the nurture, care and support for people through the childbearing year that we know has huge benefits for mother, family and baby.

Whilst I would love to be accessible to all I don’t want to be hamstrung by the NHS, frustrated at not being able to provide the support and care I know people need.

Doulas and birth keepers want to reclaim something that has been in a large part lost in modern maternity care. We’ve lost (in the most part - and yes it’s “not all midwives” we know!) our way of being “with woman (or birthing people)”. I don't want to sit there taking endless notes and pushing people to haver interventions and procedures we know people don't really need.

We’ve also lost a huge body of knowledge - thanks to an industrialised medical complex and a patriarchal system that devalues “women's work” and stigmatises birthing bodies.

Some would argue there’s a blurring of the lines as more and more birth keepers educate themselves in long forgotten practises and reclaim the roots of the work that they do but this is birth work in its purest form - it’s in the home, it’s with women/ family/ birthing people, it’s learnt from a place of humble acceptance and offered up as a tool of service - not a means of diagnosing and fixing what is perhaps not actually broken.

And whilst I’m sure that I’ll get a barrage of comments about how so and so still is “with women” or practices midwifery in the traditional sense my response is simple.

I step into the birth space on a monthly (sometimes more common) basis and this practice that you’re speaking of is not how I am seeing the majority of the people I serve being treated.

Doulas and birth keepers hold time and space, patience, individualised care, continuity of support, relationships of trust and respect, watching and listening and "being with" someone as they birth at the centre of everything they do.