Welcome to Shooby Doula birth services!
"Birth, like death, is a universal experience. It may be the most powerful creative experience in many women's lives. It can be either a disruption in the flow of human existance, a fragment having little or nothing to do with the passionate longing that created the baby, or it can be lived with beauty and dignity and labor itself can be a celebration of joy."
~Sheila Kitzinger
What is a Doula?
A birth doula is a trained birth assistant who provides support to a laboring woman and her partner. While she is not a medical professional, she can offer a wide range of comfort measures during labor, from massage to aromatherapy to continuous reassurance and pain coping techniques. Pronounced doo-lah and meaning "woman's servant", the word has now come to mean a woman experienced in childbirth who provides continuous physical, emotional and informational support to the woman before, during and just after childbirth.
Women supported by a doula in labor have been shown to have:
- 50% reduction in cesarean sections.
- 25% shorter labor.
- 60% reduction in epidural requests.
- 30% reduction in analgesia use.
- 40% reduction in forceps use.
Dads and Doulas
"In asking fathers to be the main support, our society may have created a very difficult expectation for them to meet. This is like asking fathers to play in a professional football game after several lectures but without any training or practice games."
~Klaus, Kennell, Klaus
Partners are usually and understandably nervous about the childbearing process, most often entering the event of birth concerned for their partner and child and not knowing what to expect. A doula's role, realizing that this experience will be with you the rest of your lives, is to recognize the various stages of labor and offer suggestions for coping, leaving the partner to connect with the laboring woman on a more intimate level. Reassuring both partners goes a long way toward creating a peaceful, relaxed atmosphere more conducive to a joyful birth. A doula is present not to replace the partner, but to complement it.