About a month after my 30th birthday, an elderly woman, who was admiring my 2-week-old daughter, asked my age and if I’d had any other children. When I told her this baby was my first, she warned, “Do your best to take care of your little girl because you might not have another one.” I…
➠ Continue ReadingYou’re pregnant with your first and checking out all your options. Or it’s your second or third baby, and you’re wanting a different experience than the last time around. Maybe no epidural, definitely not that awful Pitocin. Where do you start, and how do you get the experience you’re looking for? A lot of things…
➠ Continue ReadingMidwifery in the African American community is a tradition that dates back for centuries. While current rates of home births are low among black women, there was a time when the opposite was true. Ina May Gaskin explains; For the most part, women of color who lived in the rural south didn’t go into the…
➠ Continue ReadingLouisiana mom Brikea Searile posted this gorgeous video of her water birth and it has quickly gone viral. Brikea’s partner, Marcus, acts as a support throughout the birth, massaging and coaching her while Stevie Wonder and Alicia Keys play in the background. I had a water birth and, boy, did this bring back memories. Especially…
➠ Continue Reading“Remember this, for it is as true as true gets: Your body is not a lemon. You are not a machine. The Creator is not a careless mechanic. Human female bodies have the same potential to give birth well as aardvarks, lions, rhinoceri, elephants, moose, and water buffalo. Even if it has not been your…
➠ Continue ReadingMy husband is pretty fantastic. He’s super supportive of my doula work – making me breakfast-to-go in the middle of the night, listening to detailed birth stories, going with the flow of an on-call job. He’s a Math teacher, but he knows what a Foley bulb is and how to try to turn a posterior…
➠ Continue ReadingBlack women and children have different needs when it comes to pregnancy and birth. Our infant and maternal mortality rates, and our cesarean rates are higher. Some of the theories on the reasons why are racism, diet, economic standing, not having enough of the accurate information. Today I’m sharing with you a list of 7…
➠ Continue ReadingBy Lindsey Avink Birth is transformative. Nails grow beautiful from prenatal vitamins. Our bellies stretch wider than we believed they could and leave marks forever. Later, we grow muscles from carrying carseats and wearing babies. And the breasts – who knew! Yoga, squatting, breathing exercises, lotion on the tummy. We focus a lot on our…
➠ Continue ReadingBy Alicia Barnes My birth was my mother’s third c-section. The doctor told her when he touched the scalpel to her scar, she split open. “It’s a good thing you didn’t bump into any tables, ” he said, alluding her belly would have ruptured. I grew up hearing that story and believing that childbirth was…
➠ Continue ReadingBy Alicia Barnes It had been an exhausting week, and I was 38 weeks and 5 days pregnant. My husband Daniel and I were looking out the window, waiting until there was more light than dark in the sky to call my midwife again. We didn’t want to bother anyone, but we thought things might be…
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