5 Reasons Why We'll Never Share a Birth Story on Our Blog
Many doulas’ blogs are primarily focused around sharing their clients’ birth stories.
It seems like a no brainer, really. Often doulas feel it's a great way to help spread the word about the types of birth experiences they support, while showcasing their work with families.
Even though doulas typically ask permission from the families whose stories they share to post publicly, we have a different perspective on this and don't plan to ever share a birth story here, regardless of whether a client gives us permission.
Here are five reasons why you'll never see a birth story post on our blog:
Most obvious: privacy.
Birth is an intimate experience. Most of the time, parents choosing to hire a doula are only inviting a few people to share the experience with them. While there are often joyful and meaningful moments in birth, labor can also involve crying, feeling out of it, big decisions, sensitive moments, nausea... not to mention bodily fluids and varying degrees of being clothed. There's a reason why not many people are invited to share the birth experience - it's extremely personal.
Now, we have absolutely no problem with parents sharing their own birth stories if and when they want to! What we're talking about here is doulas and other birth professionals publicizing these stories in an un-anonymous way. Since we work in a specific geographical region, our clients sometimes know each other. We've even had clients who work for the same company. Thinking of the small world-ness that abounds these days with so many levels of connection, we are very careful not to share personal details about our clients, which basically means not sharing details at all - especially not in a public way via our blog.
Less obvious: "good stories" vs stories that are... not good?
Many times doulas, midwives, and other birth professionals who choose to share clients' birth stories on their websites and social media cherry-pick which stories to tell. If they select only "positive birth stories" to share (as many do), where does that leave their clients whose stories weren't shared? Does it mean their births "don't count" or "weren't good enough"?
The question of which stories to tell holds deep and important implications. We are not of the opinion that people should only read and talk about positive labor experiences while they're preparing for birth. Instead, our perspective is based in preparing realistically for the challenge and rite of passage that birth can be for parents crossing its threshold. We work with our clients to cultivate their inner resources and resilience, encouraging them to stack the deck in their favor. But when it comes down to it, birth is a mystery. None of us can predict how any birth will unfold (even planned cesarean births can hold surprises).
So we don't advocate for our clients to only read positive birth stories. But we also wouldn't feel it was responsible to share intricate details of some of the more challenging births we've attended, including births that ended with health complications. We also don't believe in sharing "horror stories" with pregnant folks. (We figure you get enough of that from other people during pregnancy.)
If we were to eliminate those less-than-ideal stories from the mix and only tell positive ones, we would be painting a dishonest picture of what our birth doula work actually looks like - not to mention sending a message to those clients whose stories we left out that their births aren't share-worthy as others are.
Also: Why We Don’t Say “Birth Is Beautiful”
And that leads us to this question: who gets to decide what a birth was like?
We believe that the person who gave birth is the person who shapes the story of their own experience. In reality, every person in the labor has their own version of how the birth went, including the person giving birth, their partner and/or loved ones, their doula(s), their care providers - maybe even their baby! We're all experiencing it through the lens of our own perspective, our own lives, our own perceptions about how the world works.
When doulas or other birth workers take over the narrative of the story, the person who gave birth no longer has a voice in that version of the story. The inner landscape of their experience is lost in someone else's telling of it. And knowing how often the external story can vary HUGELY from the internal story as experienced by the person giving birth, we are extremely conscious of that shift and choose not to tell others' stories.
We've had clients who had the exact birth experience they had wanted on paper who later described their birth as traumatic. And we've worked with others whose births took many twists and turns unexpected changes along the way that led to a very different experience than they had planned on. And sometimes, those parents feel their birth was a really positive experience despite the unforeseen challenges. From the outside, it's impossible to judge what the laboring person is experiencing - so we don't assume that we can know what birth was like.
Your birth story is just that - YOUR story.
Some doulas write their clients' birth stories out for them as a gift, or even as a normal part of their doula support package. Some people might be totally fine receiving a written birth story from their doula. But for other parents, reading someone else's account of their labor and birth experience could be unsettling, upsetting, or downright triggering.
Perhaps something the parent experienced in a negative way is portrayed in the story with a glow of positivity. Or maybe some of the really special, meaningful, or otherwise memorable moments were left out of the story, and the parent wonders if the doula just forgot, wasn't paying attention, or didn't care about them. There could be many reasons why reading an outside narrative of a life-changing event like birth could be less than wonderful.
In birth stories we've seen written by doulas, there tends to be a very positive spin on things (especially if there were challenges during labor) with a tendency toward "and they all lived happily ever after," wrapped up with a neat bow. But that’s not always how people feel in hindsight.
If the doula's written perception doesn't match up with the person's experience, that outside narrative might make the person feel that they weren't heard, that their voice and their memory of how things went didn't matter - even though THEY were the one giving birth! This can especially apply when an outside perspective is pretty positive but the person who gave birth has some mixed or negative feelings about the experience. In a story about their birth, they might read words like strong, empowered, determined, beautiful, or powerful. But in reality, they may have felt afraid, weak, lost, dependent, sad, or overwhelmed.
It's hard to be ok with experiences that are not all good or all bad. Learning to live in the grey area doesn't come easily to most of us, and this is especially true in birth. Partly for this reason (and probably - understandably - in the interest of self-promotion), birth stories written and published by birth workers can often skew more toward neat, black-and-white, filtered versions of reality... rather than the complex, layered, messy, and deeply personal experience of birth so many parents have.From our perspective, one of the most important things about our work as doulas is the non-judgmental aspect of our support. And we don't want to do anything to jeopardize that.
When we move from that supporting role into writing a narrative description of how everything happened in someone else's birth, we're automatically bringing judgment into the picture based on the descriptive words used to tell the story. If you want a cut-and-dry picture of what happened in a labor, medical charts are your best option (and even then, there can be a LOT of grey area, as well as the possibility of errors or omissions, and yes - even judgment).
We support all kinds of birth. Births that go exactly as planned and births with twists and turns. Births with epidurals and births without. Births that are induced and births that surprise everyone by happening early. Births that leave parents feeling powerful and triumphant and births that leave disappointment or trauma behind. By distilling all of that variance down into a few handpicked birth stories, we would be doing a great disservice to the diverse birth experiences of our clients - and more importantly, to the ways each birth affected and transformed each parent.
If our clients want to share their birth stories with other parents who may want to use our services, we absolutely welcome them to do so on our Google business listing! But we feel that the non-judgmental aspect of our support is so incredibly vital that we don't want to add our own spin on our clients' birth stories.
We’ll leave you with this:
We love this quote from Britta Bushnell, an award-winning childbirth educator and author, and feel that it sums up the reason a written birth story just can't do justice to the lived, transformative experience of birth:
“What if instead of asking a new parent if they gave birth “naturally” or with pain medication, we asked how birth transformed them? What if instead of asking for details about an unexpected cesarean we asked the new parent how the experience impacted them? What if we got curious about the individual rather than putting them in a binary box? Boxes tell us very little.”
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