Services -Austin Only

Item Description

What is a Doula?

Birth doulas (also called childbirth assistants, labor support professionals, birth assistants, or birth companions) provide emotional, physical and informational support during pregnancy, labor, birth and immediate postpartum.

A doula does not replace the partner. Instead she helps support the partner so that he or she can love and encourage the laboring woman.

Doulas provide support in the hospital, at home or at a birthing center -- wherever women give birth.

A doula provides continuous, uninterrupted support throughout labor and delivery. She offers massage, suggestions for position changes, relaxation techniques, reminders to stay hydrated and keep her bladder empty. She also believes in a woman's ability to birth her baby.

Throughout the ages, women have looked to other women for support while giving birth. This is a primal need and does not reflect on her relationship with her partner in any way.

Why Do I Need a Doula?

Even if you have a wonderful, caring partner, doctor or midwife, will he or she:

Provide massage?

Provide hypnosis techniques?

Provide prenatal visits in your home?

Suggest positions to ease back labor and help with pushing?

Do the double hip squeeze or provide counter pressure?

Bring his or her birth ball to make your labor easier?

Come to your home and labor with you until it's time to go to the hospital or birthing center and then stay with you until the baby is born?

Stay by your head providing encouragment while you are in transition and when the baby is being born?

Offer you cold/hot packs?

Mop your brow with a cool cloth?

Take notes during labor and provide you with a written record of the birth?

Take photographs of you and your partner with your new baby?

Help you with breastfeeding?

If the answer to any of these questions is "NO" -- you need (and deserve) a doula!

The presence of a doula during your labor can reduce the need for a surgical birth (c-section) by 40-60%.

Item Special Note

ABOUT HEATHER:

Heather has been serving the birthing families of Central Texas since moving back to her childhood home of  Austin in 2002. She began her work in the birth field in 2001 by certifying as a HypnoBirthing Childbirth Educator. Shortly thereafter she began attending the births of her students as their doula. Heather founded HypnoBirthing of Central Texas in 2003, which has provided childbirth education to over 450 families in the communities of Central Texas, from Waco to San Antonio. After the birth of her third child, she felt led to a career in midwifery and in 2004 she applied and was accepted in to the Association of Texas Midwives Midwifery Training Program. Her apprenticeship began at Juneau Family Birth Center, a nonprofit birth center in Juneau, Alaska. She was hired there as the staff doula for the Young Families program, which offered free prenatal education and birth doula services to teenage parents. After returning to Austin in late 2005, Heather continued an apprenticeship at a birth center/homebirth practice for the next 15 months. Heather graduated from ATM and was licensed as a midwife in 2007. She then began her private homebirth practice, Genesis Midwifery. Heather has five children between the ages of 13 and 3, has been married for 14 years, and is an active member of her church. She continues to work as a birth doula and childbirth educator, in addition to her roles at Central Texas Birth Center, opening her own birthing center!  

Read more about heather on her website:  http://www.genesismidwifery.com/

This is a Austin and surrounding only item!