Log In


Reset Password
Southwest Life Health And the West is History Community Travel

The art of baby-making

Doulas, midwives, childbirth educators can make journey a joyous one
Effie O’Neil, who is 39 weeks pregnant, discusses preparations for her son’s birth with her doula, Emily Flynn of Durango Doula and Childbirth Education. The two discussed the colors and scents that will be present in the birthing room and certain vitamins O’Neil should be taking.

In the abstract, having children is a glorious thing to do. But when you get down to the physically laborious and emotionally taxing reality of the years-long process – from conception and pregnancy to delivery and child-rearing – it can seem amazing humans ever bother to reproduce.

There are, however, people who can help restore the glory. In fact, in Durango, there are a lot of them, as became clear Wednesday night at a local meeting of doulas, midwives and childbirth educators.

Ten women crowded in a room, talking about the services they offer aspiring, expecting and new parents.

Part networking event, part show-and-tell, the experts traded tips and offered an “insider’s look” at the joy of having children.

Stephanie Harris of Essence Chiropractic said she loves “empowering women to get information to have their own experience because I think it’s all inside here, not in the blogs.”

“When you’re pregnant, you’re eating and drinking and living and working for two people,” she said. “That puts pressure on the spine, and you want to make sure that you have optimal nerve flow to the tissues.”

She said she loved adjusting pregnant women and babies, as birth is incredibly stressful for the bodies of both mothers and babies.

“Sometimes in a colicky baby, you can see the tension in the neck, and that can accumulate, creating a lifetime of health problems downstream,” she said.

Juanita Nelson of Community Midwives said she’s offering intensive two-day classes in early August designed to empower expecting parents in childbirth. The course is grounded in the belief that childbirth is a natural process – not an unhealthy medical aberration – and geared toward exploring “the fundamental intuition that every woman has about how to birth.”

Lindsay Petersen of Durango Natural Childbirth said she teaches classes about prenatal care and natural childbirth that focus on drug-free deliveries, using techniques like the strategic application of heat and cold to manage pain.

“I had two healthy babies with zero pain medication during labor, and my husband and I decided to start teaching childbirth because it’s a really great way to bring babies into the world,” she said.

Amy Ginn, a nurse midwife with Southwest Midwives, piped up to give her an endorsement, saying that when Petersen’s clients ended up getting an epidural during a Caesarean section, they didn’t feel like they failed Petersen or an unbending and moralistic natural childbirth philosophy.

Petersen said preparing for a natural childbirth is like driving a car safely, and hospital interventions are like seat belts: When it all unexpectedly goes wrong, you should feel grateful to have them, not mad at yourself for needing them.

Melanie Ellison, a doula with Devoted Hands Doula who writes an eponymous blog, told the group the word “doula” is derived from an ancient Greek word meaning, “servant of the woman.”

She said in an age of hospital births, mainstream medicine often convinced expecting mothers that doulas are some weird New Age invention.

“Actually, this isn’t a new fad. For thousands of years, women have had women supporting them through the entire process of childbirth to make sure that they really have what they want and need,” she said. “It’s only in the last century that we’ve stopped having women birth at home and moved them to hospitals where nurses check in but aren’t able to stay with them.”

Ellison said she saw her role as a servant and advocate, whose accumulated knowledge of childbirth and the aftermath can benefit expecting women who are scared.

Emily Flynn, a doula and childbirth educator with Durango Doula and Childbirth Education, said doulas could be especially valuable to mothers post-partum.

“There’s not a lot out there about what happens post-partum, the hormonal changes,” she said. “You’re not going to bounce back immediately; your baby is going through a growth spurt and chomping on your breast all the time; you haven’t showered in three days; you’re exhausted and emotional, and you just read that you were doing everything wrong on a mothering blog.

“That’s when a doula can come in and tell you to turn off your computer, listen to you, make you seven days worth of food for the freezer and reassure you that that pacifier isn’t going to kill your baby.”

Ginn joked that the kind of practical support Flynn was offering was so important – Southwest Midwives needed to hire a doula to make them seven-days worth of food.

Anna-Marija Helt, an herbalist and aromatherapist with Osadha Herbal Wellness, gave a snappy presentation about the natural herbal remedies she uses to treat patients struggling to conceive, focusing on the role of the liver in fertility.

“The link between liver disease and reproduction is well known and acknowledged by traditional medicine,” she said, before passing around exotic-seeming plant specimens, extracts and tea leaves, including yellow dock, a giant dandelion root and a jar of juice extracted from the Schisandra berry.

She said the dandelion was “freshly ripped out from my yard, and it’s free medicine.”

“People can make their own medicine and drink it as a tea, or you can eat it,” she said. “It’s delicious if you roast it in the oven at 200 degrees – it almost has a sweet, cacao flavor.”

cmcallister@durangoherald.com



Reader Comments