Dorothy Kamphuis, Birth Doula

I am passionate about helping and supporting women and their partners to have empowering and positive birth experiences. Consider this: the memory of bringing her child into the world is NOT a memory a mother forgets. The experience she has, whether positive or negative in her mind, will affect her and impact her immediately after the birth, the days and weeks following, and even into the years when she is no longer having babies.
Imagine a woman was able to bring her baby into the world feeling like she had a voice in the process, that her care giver knew and understood how she ideally wanted to labor and deliver, that her partner was free and at ease to support her, and that she felt like she had all the tools to make informed choices.
This is where a doula comes in. Providing a continuous presence for emotional support, physical comfort, non-clinical advice and guidance for the partner. Having a doula there just makes for a better birth experience. There is plenty of research to back this up! Less c-sections, less interventions needed (forceps, vacume), less pain medications used, less use of drugs to progress labor, less likely to rate their childbirth experience negatively. AND women who birth confidently, will mother more confidently!
I work to help women discover that with the right emotional, physical and informational support, their birth experience can be amazing. That any birth experience, whether a home water birth, a natural hospital birth, birthing with pain medication, or birth by cesarean section, can be a beautiful and positive one.