Nurturing Births Doula Services

10/21/2025

For new, accurate information about your baby receiving vitamin K at birth.

05/21/2025

Amen!

.
They may be “nice” strangers (or maybe far from it 😬) but we need to be unafraid to question this very modern practice of laboring and birthing in the presence of complete strangers.

Birth is intimate. It is raw. It is vulnerable. It is naked. It is sacred. It is intrinsically linked to the marital act and meant to be the culmination of it. It is designed to be just as honored and respected as that act.

And we’ve normalized surrounding it with people who have often never met the woman at all, or maybe for just a few ten minute appointments.

That in itself makes birth less safe. We know statistically and just through common sense an ongoing relationship with a midwife/provider/doula makes birth safer and leads to far better outcomes.

But we can also say that - outcomes aside - it is WEIRD that this has become normal in our modern world. If you value tradition and human dignity, birth with strangers as the norm is the opposite. Whether that’s the receptionist, the several L&D nurses, the assistant, the resident, the OB on call, the nursery nurse...chances are very very high that the mother - who should be the center of care and esteem in the room - has never met many people in the room who are now watching her and assessing her as she goes through this intimate rite of passage. Imagine if the same was happening on our wedding night 😳

Maybe it’s sometimes necessary but it’s still okay and right to call out that it is far far far from ideal. As far as we are able in our own stories and in the culture, let’s make this the exception annd not the rule again. Let’s see what can happen and how the world can change when women give birth and babies are welcomed into the world in an environment of genuine love, intimacy, relationship, and with the mother-baby unit at the center.

🤍

06/14/2024

You cannot spoil your baby with physical contact. They need love to grow.

06/03/2024

How breastfeeding affects language.

And why most babies still say "dada" first.

01/30/2024

I’ve often said that becoming a parent is allowing oneself to be sculpted: from a hunk of rock to marble masterpiece. In the early days you cannot see the results, you can only feel the moulding and chiseling away as you lose pieces of yourself. Once your children are grown up a bit and you look back on who you were vs who you’ve become, you can appreciate the transformation that’s taken place. If you’ve expanded your heart, grown your patience, learned deep empathy, and treated them kindly, you’ll see the beautiful work of art that you are.

01/09/2024

That is an impressive fetal ejection reflex!

10/01/2023

Raising babies is the most important job!

"A century ago*, men were following, with bated breath, the march of Napoleon, and waiting with feverish impatience for the latest news of the wars. And all the while, in their own homes, babies were being born. But who could think about babies? Everybody was thinking about battles.

"In one year, lying midway between Trafalgar and Waterloo, there stole into the world a host of heroes! During that one year, 1809, Gladstone was born at Liverpool; Alfred Tennyson was born at the Somersby rectory, and Oliver Wendell Holmes made his first appearance at Massachusetts. On the very self-same day of that self same year Charles Darwin made his debut at Shrewsbury, and Abraham Lincoln drew his first breath at Old Kentucky. Music was enriched by the advent of Frederic Chopin at Warsaw, and of Felix Mendelssohn at Hamburg...Samuel Morley, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Francis Kemple. But nobody thought of babies. Everybody was thinking of battles. Yet viewing that age in the truer perspective which the distance of a hundred years enables us to command, we may well ask ourselves, ‘Which of the battles of 1809 mattered more than the babies of 1809?’

"We fancy that God can only manage His world by big battalions abroad, when all the while He is doing it by beautiful babies. When a wrong wants righting, or a work wants doing, or a truth wants preaching, or a continent wants opening, God sends a baby into the world to do it. That is why, long, long ago, a babe was born at Bethlehem.”

Frank W. Boreham (Mountains in the Mist - published 1914*)

Artwork: Master Baby, Sir William Orchardson

https://open.substack.com/pub/allymatsoso/p/a-little-child-shall-lead-them?r=2l24ju&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web

07/20/2023

This is the right attitude for a birth worker

07/06/2023

Lol, now why can’t it be this easy?