Doula Programs


Book Description




The Doula Book


Book Description

More and more parents-to-be all over the world are choosing the comfort and reassuring support of birth with a trained labor companion called a "doula." This warm, authoritative, and irreplaceable guide completely updates the authors' earlier book, Mothering the Mother, and adds much new and important research. In addition to basic advice on finding and working with a doula, the authors show how a doula reduces the need for cesarean section, shortens the length of labor, decreases the pain medication required, and enhances bonding and breast feeding. The authors, world-renowned authorities on childbirth with combined experience of over 100 years working with laboring women, have made their book indispensable to every woman who wants the healthiest, safest, and most joyful possible birth experience.




The Doula Advantage


Book Description

Doulas and midwives are increasingly popular options for childbirth; this book answers questions for those considering the help of a doula or midwife at birth. Take Control of Your Childbirth Experience New moms are spreading the word to pregnant women just like you: Doulas make pregnancy and childbirth the celebratory experience it is meant to be! Doulas are professionally trained women who provide support before, during, and after delivery. Research has shown that doulas help women have positive birth experiences, decrease the need for pain medication, improve breastfeeding success, and reduce the need for cesarean sections and other invasive procedures. Author Rachel Gurevich interviewed more than 235 women and birth professionals to bring you this best-kept pregnancy secret. Inside, you'll find real mothers' stories and discover how doulas make a joyful difference in childbirth. You'll learn: ·The many ways doulas provide labor support, whether you plan a "natural" or medicated birth · How to find, hire, and choose the right doula ·How specialized doulas can help you before or after the baby's birth ·How doulas help the dad-to-be ·And more! Foreword by Mayer Eisenstein, M.D., medical director, Homefirst Health Services Praise for The Doula Advantage : "Doulas really do make a difference in having a safe and satisfying birth, as you will learn in this book." — William Sears, M.D., coauthor, The Baby Book "Comprehensive, thought-provoking, and highly moving. . . . A must read for any woman thinking of using the services of a doula." — Ann Douglas, author, The Mother of All Pregnancy Books and The Mother of All Baby Books




Doulas and Intimate Labour: Boundaries, Bodies and Birth


Book Description

Scholars turn to reproduction for its ability to illuminate the practices involved with negotiating personhood for the unborn, the newborn, and the already-existing family members, community members, and the nation. The scholarship in this volume draws attention to doula work as intimate and relational while highlighting the way boundaries are created, maintained, challenged, and transformed. Intimate labour as a theoretical construct provides a way to think about the kind of care doulas offer women across the reproductive spectrum. Doulas negotiate boundaries and often blur the divisions between communities and across public and private spheres in their practice of intimate labour. This book weaves together three main threads: doulas and mothers, doulas and their community, and finally, doulas and institutions. The lived experience of doulas illustrates the interlacing relationships among all three of these threads. The essays in this collection offer a unique perspective on doulas by bringing together voices that represent the full spectrum of doula work, including the viewpoints of birth, postpartum, abortion, community based, adoption, prison, and radical doulas. We privilege this broad representation of doula experiences to emphasize the importance of a multi-vocal framing of the doula experience. As doulas move between worlds and learn to live in liminal spaces, they occupy space that allows them to generate new cultural narratives about birthing bodies.




The Doula Guide to Birth


Book Description

Here is your guide to the fastest-growing trend in childbirth—a tradition as old as motherhood itself. Doulas, or professional labor assistants, have led thousands of expectant women through the birthing process in a way that’s safe and meaningful, and that creates the birth and postbirth experience all mothers long for. What exactly do doulas do? How to find one that suits you. What are the “trade secrets” only doulas know but every woman should be aware of (even if you don’t have a doula)? In The Doula Guide to Birth, senior-level doula Ananda Lowe and award-winning health reporter Rachel Zimmerman have written a most comprehensive book that draws on the wisdom of these skilled experts, whose experience with doctors, midwives, nurses, and hospitals makes them invaluable advocates before, during, and after birth. * Labor techniques anyone can use * Pain medication: do you, don’t you—and when? * What dads and loved ones need and can do best * When should you really go to the hospital in labor? * How to prepare for unexpected medical procedures, including cesareans and epidural * Postpartum—what it’s really like * A clip-out chart of labor techniques, birth plan worksheets, and much more Combining science, wit, warmth, and support, as well as the inspirational stories of dozens of mothers and their partners, you’ll find the “doula viewpoint” on every major pregnancy and delivery issue, making this one of the most important childbirth books you’ll ever read and recommend.




The Doulas


Book Description

Weaving together how-to manual, activist memoir, and manifesto, The Doulas is an “honest, raw, and charged” treatise on full-spectrum doula care. (Rewire) As more feminist conversation migrates online, the activist providers of the Doula Project remain focused on life’s physically intimate relationships: between caregivers and patients, parents and pregnancy, individuals and their own bodies. They are committed to supporting a pregnancy no matter the outcome—whether it results in birth, abortion, miscarriage, or adoption—and to facing the question of choice head-on. In this eye-opening book, Doula Project founders Mary Mahoney and Lauren Mitchell present the history, philosophy, and practices of these caregivers, contextualizing the doula movement within the larger scope of pregnancy care and reproductive rights. They illustrate how, through their unique hands-on activism, full-spectrum doulas provide tangible support for those confronting life, death, and the sticky in-between.




A Culturally Centered and Intersectional Approach to Reproductive Justice


Book Description

This book focuses on reproductive justice through a culturally-centered and intersectional lens. The autoethnographic nature of each chapter allows contributors to unpack issues surrounding reproductive justice from their perspectives and allows readers to look towards understanding the issue from a personal and structural level.




The Healthy Start Program


Book Description




Laboring On


Book Description

Facing the polar forces of an epidemic of Cesarean sections and epidurals and home-like labor rooms, American birth is in transition. Caught between the most extreme medicalization — best seen in a Cesarean section rate of nearly 30 percent — and a rhetoric of women’s "choices" and "the natural," women and their midwives, doulas, obstetricians, and nurses labor on. Laboring On offers the voices of all of these practitioners, all women trying to help women, as they struggle with this increasingly split vision of birth. Updating Barbara Katz Rothman's now-classic In Labor, the first feminist sociological analysis of birth in the United States, Laboring On gives a comprehensive picture of the ever-changing American birth practices and often conflicting visions of birth practitioners. The authors deftly weave compelling accounts of birth work, by midwives, doulas, obstetricians, and nurses, into the larger sociohistorical context of health care practices and activism and offer provocative arguments about the current state of affairs and the future of birth in America.




Body Battlegrounds


Book Description

Body Battlegrounds explores the rich and complex lives of society's body outlaws—individuals from myriad social locations who oppose hegemonic norms, customs, and conventions about the body. Original research chapters (based on textual analysis, qualitative interviews, and participant observation) along with personal narratives provide a window into the everyday lives of people rewriting the norms of embodiment in sites like schools, sporting events, and doctors' offices. Table of Contents Introduction | Chris Bobel and Samantha Kwan Part I: Going "Natural" • Body Hair Battlegrounds: The Consequences, Reverberations, and Promises of Women Growing Their Leg, Pubic, and Underarm Hair | Breanne Fahs • Radical Doulas, Childbirth Activism, and the Politics of Embodiment | Monica Basile • Caring for the Corpse: Embodied Transgression and Transformation in Home Funeral Advocacy | Anne Esacove Living Resistance: • Deconstructing Reconstructing: Challenging Medical Advice Following Mastectomy | Joanna Rankin • My Ten-Year Dreadlock Journey: Why I Love the "Kink" in My Hair . . . Today | Cheryl Thompson • Living My Full Life: My Rejecting Weight Loss as an Imperative for Recovery from Binge Eating Disorder | Christina Fisanick • Pretty Brown: Encounters with My Skin Color | Praveena Lakshmanan Part II: Representing Resistance • Blood as Resistance: Photography as Contemporary Menstrual Activism | Shayda Kafai • Am I Pretty Enough for You Yet?: Resistance through Parody in the Pretty or Ugly YouTube Trend | Katherine Phelps • The Infidel in the Mirror: Mormon Women's Oppositional Embodiment | Kelly Grove and Doug Schrock Living Resistance: • A Cystor's Story: Polycystic Ovarian Syndrome and the Disruption of Normative Femininity | Ledah McKellar • Old Bags Take a Stand: A Face Off with Ageism in America | Faith Baum and Lori Petchers • Making Up with My Body: Applying Cosmetics to Resist Disembodiment | Haley Gentile • I Am a Person Now: Autism, Indistinguishability, and (Non)optimal Outcome | Alyssa Hillary Part III: Creating Community, Disrupting Assumptions • Yelling and Pushing on the Bus: The Complexity of Black Girls' Resistance | Stephanie D. Sears and Maxine Leeds Craig • Big Gay Men's Performative Protest Against Body Shaming: The Case of Girth and Mirth | Jason Whitesel • "What's Love Got to Do with It?": The Embodied Activism of Domestic Violence Survivors on Welfare | Sheila M. Katz Living Resistance: • "Your Signing Is So Beautiful!": The Radical Invisibility of ASL Interpreters in Public | Rachel Kolb • Two Shakes | Rev. Adam Lawrence Dyer • "Showing Our Muslim": Embracing the Hijab in the Era of Paradox | Sara Rehman • "Doing Out": A Black Dandy Defies Gender Norms in the Bronx | Mark Broomfield • Everybody: Making Fat Radio for All of Us | Cat Pausé Part IV: Transforming Institutions and Ideologies • Embodying Nonexistence: Encountering Mono- and Cisnormativities in Everyday Life | J. E. Sumerau • Freeing the Nipple: Encoding the Heterosexual Male Gaze into Law | J. Shoshanna Ehrlich • Give Us a Twirl: Male Baton Twirlers' Embodied Resistance in a Feminized Terrain | Trenton M. Haltom • "That Gentle Somebody": Rethinking Black Female Same-Sex Practices and Heteronormativity in Contemporary South Africa | Taylor Riley Living Resistance: