Norwest Doula Services

16/11/2025

What a strange world we live in 😢

13/11/2025

🟣 BLOG POST
Back by popular demand. I've revised, updated and republished my VBAC blog post so you can all stop messaging me about it 😆
"A VBAC is simply a birth. The most likely outcome of going into spontaneous labour after a previous c-section is the vaginal birth of a healthy baby. If we stop making a mountain out of a molehill, and instead nurture self-trust and support physiology, more women will experience VBAC as a healing and empowering rite of passage."
https://www.rachelreed.website/blog/vbac

09/11/2025

💗

Something most people never realize… your body is a living pharmacy.

Every time your baby latches, you’re not just nourishing them, you’re delivering customized medicine: antibodies, anti-inflammatories, hormones, enzymes, stem cells, and comfort all in one. Your milk shifts with your baby’s age, time of day, and even their saliva signals, fine-tuning itself to meet their exact needs.

No prescription can match that kind of precision.
No lab can replicate that kind of intelligence.

The most powerful pharmacy in the world doesn’t have walls, it has you. 🤱🏼💫

06/11/2025

I could not possibly have articulated this so well.

Lamaze Australia's response to the recent statement issued by RANZCOG and ACM regarding freebirths and doulas.

(https://midwives.org.au/Web/News-media-releases/Articles/2025/03_November/Jooint_Call_Health_Ministers_End_Freebirth_Deaths.aspx?fbclid=IwdGRjcAN1T0xleHRuA2FlbQIxMQABHgHeqS3NVt6yc3hUxY2oE_ZzIWPR3RQRUJ6czjfQrApSZDdCTGbMLstCrI0C_aem_Wp82Fuwdc37aBYOtg_QJTg)

When Women Die in Childbirth, Blame Fails Us. Listening Might Save Lives.

The recent tragic deaths of several Australian women and babies following freebirths have rightly ignited grief and concern across the nation. Any maternal or neonatal death is heartbreaking, and communities affected by these losses deserve compassion and support.

However, calls to criminalise doulas or restrict freebirth represent a deeply troubling response. They threaten to undermine women’s reproductive autonomy, fail to address the systemic drivers pushing some women away from mainstream maternity care, and risk repeating a historic pattern: when women suffer, the instinct is to police them rather than listen to them.

Women’s Autonomy Is Not Optional

Whether one agrees with freebirth or not is immaterial. At the heart of this issue lies a fundamental principle: women have the right to bodily autonomy. This includes the right to decide where, how, and with whom they give birth. Restricting this right leads us onto dangerous ground, eroding sexual and reproductive health and rights enshrined in international law, including the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW) and the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR).

Attempts to limit women’s legal rights around childbirth should alarm us all. History teaches that reproductive control rarely stops at one point of intervention.

The Difficult Question Too Few Are Asking: Why?

Critics have rushed to blame social media influencers and so-called “birth keepers” for these deaths. This simplistic narrative dismisses the real motivations driving women’s decisions and insults their intelligence. Women do not reject the healthcare system on a whim; they do so because, in their experiences or in the experiences of those they trust, it has already rejected them.

Each year about 300,000 women give birth in Australia. Approximately 97 percent do so in hospital; around 1.8 percent in birth centres; and 0.3 percent at home, mostly through regulated midwifery models. Freebirth accounts for a tiny fraction of births. There is no evidence of a sudden surge; what has increased is public attention.

What also continues to rise is birth trauma. One in three women in Australia report their birth as traumatic, and around 10 percent develop symptoms consistent with post-traumatic stress disorder. This is not fringe rhetoric. These figures come from large-scale Australian research and government-commissioned reports.
We also operate in a highly medicalised maternity environment. Induction rates for first-time mothers are close to 50 percent, and caesarean births approach 40 percent. This escalation in intervention has not corresponded with improved clinical outcomes, but it has contributed to increasing morbidity and psychological distress.

Associate Professor Vinay Rane recently noted that hospitals “can feel quite clinical and too bright, too busy,” and must work to become more inclusive and accessible. This understatement gestures toward a far deeper truth: women are telling us they do not always feel safe, respected, or seen in our maternity system. Dismissing that reality drives them further away.

Doulas Are Not the Problem

Doulas have become convenient scapegoats in this debate. In reality, they are trained providers of emotional, physical, and informational support. They do not perform clinical tasks or replace midwives or doctors. Decades of international and Australian evidence show that continuous non-clinical labour support reduces intervention rates, caesarean births, instrumental delivery, epidural use, and improves maternal emotional outcomes.

In a system where fewer than 10 percent of Australian women receive continuity of midwifery care, doulas fill a vital gap. Restricting them would remove one of the few evidence-based supports women can reliably access.

What Women Are Telling Us

Women are not turning away from maternity services because they are naïve or reckless. They are turning away because they are frightened of being silenced, coerced, disrespected, or traumatised.
Women tell us this in surveys, inquiries, patient complaints, advocacy forums, and public submissions. Silencing them will not make them safer. Listening to them might.

The Real Work Ahead

If we want to prevent further tragedies, we must move beyond regulation and toward reform:
• Expand access to continuity-of-midwifery-care models
• Embed trauma-informed, culturally safe care across all services
• Strengthen community-based childbirth education
• Protect and integrate doulas into collaborative maternity care pathways
• Address systemic obstetric violence, coercion, and racism
• Centre women’s experiences in policy, practice, and evaluation

The Bottom Line

Doulas are not to blame. Women are not to blame. The system has been broken for decades and women are simply doing whatever they can to ensure that they birth surrounded by people who will protect them and care for them throughout one of life’s most vulnerable moments. It is time to turn the spotlight on the real culprit: our maternity care system. Fixing it is not optional; it is overdue. Women deserve safety, dignity, and respect in childbirth, and they will keep seeking it wherever they can find it.

04/10/2025

Remembering all the precious babies, their parents and loved ones 🩷🩷

Babies don’t replace babies.

October is Pregnancy & Infant Loss Awareness Month, and I think it’s important to say this out loud,

A new baby doesn’t erase the one you lost.
A rainbow doesn’t erase the storm that came before it.
A new heartbeat doesn’t silence the ache of the one that stopped.

Every child is their own person.
Every bond is unique.
Every love is sacred and irreplaceable.

Grief and joy can exist side by side.
You can miss one baby with every ounce of your soul, while still loving another with your whole heart.
It’s not replacement.
It’s not forgetting.
It’s carrying both love and loss at the same time.

So if you’ve lost a baby, your love for them is forever valid.
And if you’ve gone on to have more children, that love doesn’t replace, it simply multiplies.

Because babies don’t replace babies.
And this month, we remember them all.

©️Caty Sanders

25/09/2025

Sometimes we have a to break out the big guns with this position. It’s not fun but it can definitely do the trick! Have you ever done Walchers during labor? Here’s a great explanation on how and why it works

Posted • This crazy-looking position is called Walcher’s and dates all the way back to 19th-century Germany and was first described by Gustav Adolf Walcher, a German obstetrician, in 1889.

The goal was to physiologically (naturally with no medicine) increase the anteroposterior (front-to-back and also medically known as the true conjugate) diameter of the pelvic inlet (top of the pelvis), potentially allowing the baby to descend and get into the pelvis. It can increase the pelvic inlet size by 1-2 cm!

This position is meant to be used if the baby is high in the pelvis, and you’ve tried everything else to help it get in (lower), especially if the pregnant person is very dilated but the baby is still high.

Nurses, you know those cervixes that are super dilated and stretchy and all that needs to happen is the baby drop and you’ve tried everything… consider Walcher’s!

Thank you for this incredible birth photo! Be sure to follow them!

Some Walcher’s tips to remember:

- You (nurse) needs to be there and make sure the sacrum is anchored on the top part of the bed.
- Lower the lower end of the bed first before you fully disconnect the bottom of the bed (you can see this here, the bed is broken in 2 pieces, so that you can assure that you or your patient doesn’t fall off!
- Do this for 3 contractions only. If you feel light-headed, let your nurse know and then readjust so they don’t pass out due to aortic compression.
- Be prepared that if it works and this was the reason baby wasn’t coming down, you may have an immenent birth!
- Expect the FHR (fetal heart rate) tracing to potentially have decels. It’s 3 contractions, ideally the reason is for rapid descent.
- This is NOT to be used as a routine position, but rather one as a back-pocket trick.

Have you tried this and seen it work?

Share your stories below for both families & nurses!

21/09/2025

Disrupting breastfeeding confidence a drip at a time.
Alex Smith draws attention to the effect that IV fluids given to the mother in labour may have on her baby’s initial weight loss.
https://www.aims.org.uk/journal/item/iv-fluids-labour

08/09/2025

04/09/2025

This is for our birthing sisters 💗

24/08/2025

How To Store Pumped Br€ast Milk

Pro Tip 1: Use a sharpie and br€ast milk storage bags to label when the milk was pumped. You think you will remember, but as a new Mom you have plenty of other things to worry about. ⁣⁣⁣⁣⁣⁣

Pro Tip 2: Any remaining milk left in a bottle after your baby is finished with a feeding should be used within two hours, or, if quickly refrigerated, used for the next feeding.

⁣⁣⁣⁣⁣⁣Pro Tip 3: After thawing frozen milk, use within 24 hours if kept in refrigerator. Use within 2 hours if kept at room temperature. ⁣⁣⁣⁣⁣⁣

Pro Tip 4: If you're unsure if milk is still safe to feed your baby, you don't have to throw it out. You can use it on their skin to treat diaper rash or to treat sore n1pples.

📸 ⁣⁣⁣juna.moms