In addition to being a full time credit student fighting to get into the nursing program at the local community college, I am training to be a doula, which is a childbirth assistant. At this stage, it involves a lot of reading, and attending a childbirth education course and a breastfeeding course. Most people hear this and think "Oh god, why would you want to do that?" but I really feel passionate about helping women regain power and taking control of their birthing experience. Someday I will do this as a midwife, but for now, I am excited about being there to support women and help them have the delivery they want. In the course of all this learning you are going to hear several rants about how corporate I think the labor and delivery industry is and how there is a serious lack of respect for the natural abilities of the female body when it comes to this area. For now though, you just get really interesting facts that I learned today....

Results from 10 different randomized trials of continuous doula support (through meta-analysis) were calculated together and found that the presence of a doula throughout a womans labor and delivery reduced:
- cesarean rates by 45%
-oxytocin use by 50%
-length of labor by 25%
-pain medication use by 31%
-need for forceps by 34%
-requests for epidurals were reduced by 10-60% (I know, that is a ridiculously wide range.) This illustrates that while not all women would choose a doula in place of an epidural analgesia, all laboring women shoudl provided with the continuous support of a doula.

Please keep in mind that the participants of these studies had "normal" pregnancies with no complications for mother, and none anticapted for the baby either. One of the wonderful things about a doula is that they are there to support the mother through any decisions or needs that she has during labor and delivery. Whether that means lots of massage, encouragment, support, pain medication, medical intervention, cesarean. I had what would be called a normal and easy labor and delivery, and it was incredibly hard. The hardest moment was looking into my mother and partners eyes, in need of the encouragement it was going to take to get me through this, and seeing that they were even more anxious and scared than I was. Having an objective and experienced woman who understood what was normal and knew how to coach someone through it would have made a world of difference.


That is just one reason why I want to be one...