Doulas Are Revolutionary!

What’s the best compliment you ever received?

My answer: “You are a true revolutionary.”

Okay, I’m a sucker for anything radical, out of the box, un-mainstream, and bucking the status quo, so I was thrilled to hear someone think I was revolutionary!

The person who delivered that compliment was my doula client, who had just given birth by cesarean a week prior. She had planned to birth at home, but a fever sent her to the hospital where she was ushered into the OR because of an infection soon after arrival. I hardly expected her to think I was great as a doula (after all, she didn’t have the birth she wanted and some people tend to blame their disappointment on the doula)...let alone think I was ‘revolutionary’.

“Why do you say that?” I asked.

“Because you, and my midwives, are in the trenches, helping people to have the kind of birth they want when everything in our society is set up against that. You came to my home, you supported what I wanted, you helped me and my husband work together. You come at all hours and answer the phone whenever I call. You do what you believe in. No one else does those things. You are true revolutionaries!”

Wow. Okay. All that was true. But if we were revolutionary, then she was too.

She was one of the less than 3% of people who chose to birth out of the hospital in the United States that year. In barely more than a century, birth had moved from 90% at home (1900) to 97% in the hospital (2018).

The majority of births in the early 1900s were attended by midwives. And then a political smear campaign against midwives was run by the medical establishment to discredit midwives and encourage white people to birth in the hospital. Black, indigenous, immigrant, and poor white birthing people were primarily still attended by midwives until the 1930-1940s. By 1950, 80-90% of all babies were delivered by doctors in the hospital.

There is a long line of revolutionaries that lead to modern home birth midwives, and doulas; at the head of the line are the Black Grand midwives who continued to serve their communities after white male physicians took control of birth in the early 1900s (see for example, Margaret Charles Smith and Onnie Lee Logan). Following in their footsteps are the people who resurrected midwifery and fought to legalize it in the 1970s and 1980s (and to this day), the leaders of the modern family-centered childbirth education movement, today's midwives who continue to push back against the medicalized birth industry, and the doulas who support birthing families wherever they choose to birth.

Bringing birth back into the community, and out of profit-motivated hospitals, is revolutionary. The work of home birth midwives and doulas is revolutionary. The choice of home birthing families is revolutionary.

Long live the revolution!