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Note (displayLabel="Scholarly concentration"): Medical Humanities and Ethics
Abstract: A doula is a trained individual who provides emotional, psychological, physical and informational support to mothers before, during and after birth. Doulas also provide services to individuals throughout the abortion process. There is a growing body of research that suggests that the use of doulas has improved health outcomes for families during childbirth and the postpartum period. Beyond clearcut cost and health outcome improvements, doula care is also associated with improved patient satisfaction. However, there has been little voice given to the actual providers of these specific reproductive healthcare services. Inspired by the reproductive justice activist oral history collection at Smith College and David Cline's Creating Choice - I chose to conduct an oral history project to give voice to doula work in the hopes of recognizing their work and sharing their value with the physician community. My primary goal was to collect narratives from doulas to answer three specific questions: 1) What are the needs of women during the experiences of pregnancy, labor and abortion and which of these needs are not being met by physicians? 2) How are doulas able to fulfill these needs? 3) How can women from underserved communities benefit from the care of doulas? Over the course of the summer of 2016, I collected narratives from 9 doulas working in New York City - both in hospitals and private homes. Most were full-spectrum birth doulas that also provided postpartum care. The interviews were framed by the Oral History Association\u2019s interview guidelines and protocol (1).There were several common themes that ran throughout the narratives that I documented. Doulas continually distinguished between perceived roles of a physician and their own role as a healthcare provider. Doulas emphasized that there were emotional and psychological needs that are not met by current reproductive healthcare, but that it was necessarily a gap in the care provided by physicians. Rather, they advocated for the need of a separate mode of care - provided by the doula, and understood and supported by the remainder of the healthcare team.
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