Beyond Birth Support Doula Services

06/12/2025

Hands-off seems to be a difficult concept for most providers, but it's a very good option for moms!

03/11/2025

"Pregnancy is a time to build and nurture self-trust and reinforce the woman as the expert. It is not a time to disempower her and reinforce fear and external expertise. Care providers should:

Reinforce the woman's trust in her body and baby, and her innate wisdom and intuition (that includes knowing if she needs help).
Discuss the possibility that her labour may be different (not better or worse) and might not fit general expectations about labour patterns/progress.
Remind her that the baby will turn once they get into the pelvic cavity in labour, or may even be born OP.
Tell her positive OP birth stories and connect her with other women who have experienced positive OP labours."

🟣 We need to reclaim knowledge about physiological occiput-posterior positions. If we keep pathologising and intervening with 'normal', we will lose the ability to identify an actual complication.
https://www.rachelreed.website/blog/in-celebration-of-the-occipito-posterior-baby

03/10/2025

If FB lets me share this... This is a wonderful podcast!

Are you pregnant and have been told that your baby is too big or too small? Do they want to induce you or give you a caesarean because of it? This episode is a compilation of the information shared on this podcast over a year ago in the big babies, small babies episodes. It’s been given revamp to....

08/19/2022

More proof that there's no rules to labor! Everyone is so different.

05/24/2022

Really helpful!

⚠️Not all Hip squeezes are the same.

*WHERE & WHEN* can either Hinder or Progress labor.

Do you know WHERE to place your hands on a laboring womans pelvis and WHEN, to effectively help labor progress?

Counterpressure could actually counteract labor progression if done incorrectly.

Even tho it enables comfort does not mean it helps enable labor to progress.

Rather than placing your hands where she experiences the discomfort, you want to place your hands on the opposite end.

When we are putting our hands at the top of the pelvis (Tubercles) pressing inwards, we are restricting pelvic mobility by jamming up the S.I joints, this actually inhibits the baby from engaging and making their cardinal movements through the superior opening Inlet & progressing labor.

INLET
If you want to relieve pressure, provide comfort and support babies cardinal movement into the inlet you want to be pressing on the bottom of the sacrum with the palm of your hand.

OUTLET
If you want to relieve pressure, provide comfort and support babies cardinal movement through the outlet, you want to be pressing on the top of the sacrum with the palm of your hand.

MID PELVIS-SACRAL PRESSURE
As baby makes their way through the pelvis and into/out of the outlet, a mother may desire counter pressure on her tailbone, likewise this hinders the opening of the outlet- when we put pressure where she experiences the pain we actually hinder the babies opportunity to make their way out - We want to actually apply pressure on the top of her sacrum to help engage the outlet opening and babies decent plus give the birthing mother external physical support.

WHEN AND HOW TO HIP SQUEEZE:
To support babies cardinal movements through the outlet and provide comfort to the birthing mother, you can place your hands at the top of her Hips - Tubercles (Top of pelvis on either side of hips) and apply pressure, flowing with her maternal motions.

NOT SURE
When you are not sure what you do, you can push at the front of the tubercles and this will modify, the inlet, mid pelvis and outlet.

DECENDING
Applying pressure and opening to the Sitz bones (Cooks pressure)

📷•.joy.az

Optimal Maternal Positioning

04/13/2022

I love it when people just speak the truth!

For the first several years of my blog, I didn't share recipes that featured meat. It felt unsafe to do so. There were people in my sphere who worked for animal rights organizations, like PETA, and who would attack anything I posted if it wasn't in full support of vegan ideology.
At the time, I figured... Well, most people need more help eating vegetables anyways, so why not just focus there. After all, during my vegetarian phase, I was forced to learn to cook a lot of different vegetables that I previously wasn't familiar with. (This, of course, was years before the carnivore movement gained traction, and now eating vegetables is also controversial, haha!)
Overtime, as I niched down into pregnancy nutrition as my primary focus, it became clear that I needed to address the elephant in the room. Either I would develop meal plans that catered towards vegetarian/vegan diets and call them "complete" or I wouldn't. I did develop those meal plans, actually, and they fell short, even when incorporating all the vegan superfoods (spirulina, fermented foods, sprouted legumes, etc). I've never seen an unsupplemented vegan meal plan that meets the choline requirements of pregnancy or nursing, for example.
The more I uncover about the roles of different micronutrients, like the many so-called non-essential amino acids that are ONLY found in animal foods, the more clear it is to me that if my work is to highlight what is OPTIMAL (and that's where I always focus), then it's simply going to be a diet that includes animal foods. Love me or hate me, that's my stance. Data in Ch 3 of
If you're transitioning off of a vegan diet and need a container of support & insight to guide you, check out The Confessions (of a Recovering Vegan) series. Catch 50 interviews, mine included. Presale ends Sunday, then the price more than doubles. Link in stories or go to https://bit.ly/realfoodnourish

04/08/2022

It makes me sad that so many women with PCOS are never told about natural options that might help them!

03/03/2022

https://midwifethinking.com/2016/06/08/in-celebration-of-the-op-baby/

12/14/2021

Good reminders here for all of us.

After Maya Vander opened up about losing a pregnancy at 38 weeks, joj shared what they'd wished they had known about stillbirths.

11/04/2021

Can't wait to listen!

08/10/2021

"To begin, the placenta is a fetal organ, meaning it is made from the same s***m and egg that makes the baby. As the baby grows and ages, so does the placenta. Both the baby and the placenta (which comes from the same genetic material) need to reach a certain level of maturity in order to be born healthy. The placenta does not suddenly expire when the pregnancy reaches an arbitrary number of weeks."

A healthy placenta will develop calcium deposits at term, meaning when the baby is ready to be born, just like we get grey hairs when we get older. It's a healthy part of a growing placenta and isn't a reason to induce.

07/06/2021

So true!!

So true! We love to hear that sacred birthing song.