May 20, 2025
The Importance of Sharing Birth Stories: Podcast Episode #291
Kristin Revere and Dr. Elliot Berlin discuss the importance of reading or listening to birth stories and why it is valuable to share or record your own birth stories. Dr. Berlin hosts a narrative podcast on birth stories called “One Way or a Mother” as well as the “Informed Pregnancy Podcast”.
Hello! This is Kristin Revere with Ask the Doulas, and I am thrilled to bring back by popular demand Dr. Elliot Berlin.
Dr. Berlin is an award-winning prenatal chiropractor, childbirth educator, labor support body worker, media creator, and co-founder of Berlin Wellness Group in Los Angeles, California.
He also is the host of Informed Pregnancy Podcast and the creator of Informed Pregnancy Media. Dr. Berlin also happens to be a doula.
Welcome back, Dr. Berlin!
Thank you, Kristin, for having me back! I really appreciate it.
I’m excited about our topic today! We’re going to focus on the importance of not only reading or listening to birth stories to prepare for your upcoming birth and postnatal phase, but also the importance of sharing those stories.
Yeah, I realize that in today’s world, most people have very little exposure, if any, to childbirth, postpartum, lactation, until it’s their turn. Up until then, most of the information that they do get comes from media, which is not a great source of reality. TV, movies, newspaper headlines. They’re all pretty dramatized. You’re never going to see a headline, for example, that says all planes landed safely today. You’re only going to see the very few that have an issue. If that’s all you’re exposed to about childbirth, it makes sense that when somebody gets to their turn to do it, they’re pretty nervous about it; terrified, perhaps. And it’s a big turn from where things were just a generation or two back, when we were living pretty much on family properties in villages and you would see the other members of your family through their pregnancies. You would help through their pregnancies, their birth experiences, their postpartum, their breastfeeding. That just became something that you’re naturally exposed to.
Exactly.
And the shape, the influence that it would have on your own experience was wildly different than the influence of media today, which has replaced that, has on your experience. Coincidentally, we also lost all the people, just like you would help support your family members, when it was your turn, they would all be there to help you. We lost that support, as well. And to some degree, that’s been replaced with professionals, like the work that you guys do. And we have the childbirth educator. We have the labor doula, the postpartum doula, the lactation consultant. Those were all things that were kind of built into the village. At least we have ways to replace them and caring, nurturing, knowledgeable people to do it. But it’s a different experience than being absorbed by it constantly.
I think that people who are comfortable sharing their birth stories, just as they happen, are helping to fill the void a little bit on the lack of information and exposure to what childbirth is like.
Right, and not everyone takes a comprehensive childbirth class, like HypnoBirthing where they will show some births with different outcomes, birth examples, or there wouldn’t necessarily be someone directed to, say, Ina May Gaskin, who’s got some amazing birth stories. That was my entry with my first pregnancy and preparation, The Business of Being Born and Ina May Gaskin books and really trying to understand beyond what my Lamaze class taught me.
Right. And I think that sometimes – if, for example, you take a hospital childbirth education class, you’re getting a hospital’s perspective on childbirth. And if you take a more neutral class, you generally get a more well-rounded view of what childbirth can look like. I remember that Dr. Fischbein used to say that childbirth education classes were about how to be a good patient while giving birth at our hospital. It takes away a lot of the autonomy from thinking through all the options yourself and making the choices that you feel best with, that you want for yourself.
And part of that is the stories that they’ll share in that class, within that sort of confined environment. Very different than what you might find in a environment or a source that’s not so agenda-focused.
Exactly. And again, different outcomes, different goals and stories, whether it’s a couple who struggle with IVF or with fertility and went the IVF route, or a couple with multiples and some of the different concerns that people have. And I love the unique stories that you share on Informed Pregnancy Podcast. I direct a lot of our doula clients at Gold Coast to the stories you share. You have an even more comprehensive project that gives not just a one-episode summary for a story but is more of a series. So I would love for you to share more about your new project.
Well, thanks. We’re always looking for ways to expand how we can give a sneak peek, a fly on the wall view, of other people’s experiences so you can learn from them. And on Informed Pregnancy Podcast, what happens – we do a lot of episodes called Before & After, so we’ll interview somebody before they have their baby, and a lot of that interview might be, what are you planning for in your birth? What’s your vision? What do you want it to be like? How are you planning to get there? And then we’ll interview them afterwards. How did it go? And we’re committed, and we try to make sure that the patients are committed, that no matter what the experience is, we’ll share the second half and how things went, even if it didn’t go exactly how you wanted. And sometimes it does go exactly how they want, and sometimes it doesn’t. And when it doesn’t, sometimes it wildly beats their expectations. Wow, I never could have known what that awesome experience could have been like until I went through it. Sometimes, it doesn’t meet their expectations and it goes in a very different direction. Also, though, the common theme is they come back saying, I really never could have known that birth could be like that until I went through it.
And so essentially, why they’re sharing their stories is to take the information that they’ve garnered from experiencing their personal situation and the things that they learned from it, they really felt that they couldn’t have known without going through it, and sharing it with other people before they go through it. They’re very popular episodes in general. We’ve been blessed to have many celebrities come and do Before & After episodes of their birth stories, and those are extremely popular.
But we reach out to our listenership and we ask regularly, what would you like to hear that we’re not already doing? Or what would you not like to hear that we are doing? And the feedback that we got on the Before & After stories is that we want more depth. Take us in deeper, because it’s sometimes a 40-hour birth story, and we have a 40-minute podcast. It’s like one minute per hour. It’s very much going through bullet points. And with those births, it’s defeating the purpose of trying to garner some valuable information out of it, because we just move too quickly.
I got the idea from the podcast Serial, where they tell a serialized story, like a meaty, juicy story with a lot going on from multiple angles. It’s not interviewing a person. It’s interviewing a bunch of people and trying to get much greater perspective on what happened in that story. And the story takes a whole season. And it’s told in a serialized format. So I thought, okay, to fulfill the desires of our listeners, I’m going deeper into a birth story. Let’s take a birth story that’s not so straightforward and do that. Interview a bunch of people around our protagonist, our mom who’s expecting, and try to take you even deeper.
We have three seasons recorded, and the first one is coming out right now. It’s called One Way or a Mother. I was going to call it Baby Serial, but I didn’t want to get sued, so we called it One Way or a Mother.
I love the name!
Thank you! And in season 1, Ariana is a very dynamic person, with her first pregnancy. It’s a story that’s not so uncommon, unfortunately. She was planning to have a home birth, and in the end, had a Cesarean birth that she was not expecting and wonders if she even needed it and just really didn’t plan for it. So it really shook her system physically but also on an emotional and spiritual level. And we catch up with her, now pregnant again, and trying to process her first experience and seeing if she can have a better second experience. Some of that processing is talking to her, just her own thoughts. We talk to her husband, Zach. We talk to her midwife from the previous birth. We talk to her obstetrician. We talk to her doula. We talk to her reiki healer, who she affectionately calls the witch, and we talk to her mom even, kind of getting into the ancestral things that probably she brought into her original experience.
And it’s something that when people listen to it, especially if they’ve been through a similar situation and got surprised by a Cesarean birth they weren’t expecting – but really anybody, when you listen to her kind of strip away the layers and find her voice and listen to it and find her confidence and her strength going into this new pregnancy and birth experience, it sort of becomes clear that the end result is not necessarily to have the vaginal birth after Cesarean that she’s going for but to have a better, more empowered birth experience, which is something that I think everybody wants.
Regardless of outcome, yes, 100%.
But a lot of people don’t even realize that they need to think about it until it’s sort of too late and they’re already there.
So Ariana shares, and all the people around her share really openly, and they take us very deep into the experience, which I’m very grateful for. They’re wonderful story tellers. It’s very easy to get absorbed in her world. And it was a totally new type of production for us to interview somebody and then sort of edit it down into an enjoyable, informative podcast. But this took us a very long time, to figure out the model and to figure out the chemistry of how to weave it all together. I’m very happy with how it came out. The feedback from preliminary audiences is very good, and we’re happy to launch it. We’re already working on season two and season three, and those stories get even more exciting and unique with each season that goes by. Spoiler alert on season two, it’s a very fascinating best friends surrogacy story.
Oh, beautiful!
And season three is a mom who had a baby and then was experiencing secondary infertility as she tried for her second baby, and she went the path of medical assistance and created one embryo. They put it in and wound up finding out that she was pregnant with four babies. So again, the interviews are very dynamic in each of these cases, the protagonists, but also the people around them and really getting knee-deep into these stories in a very entertaining but informative way.
Brilliant – that’s all I can say! I am so excited, and I love that you bring in the OBs and midwives and doulas and family members, partners if there is a partner. That is exactly what is missing in the birth and baby space. Nice work!
Thank you! I love being on the same team with you and other really powerful thinkers and doers. I don’t know when you sleep; you always have new projects and programs coming out in the same space with the same mission, trying to help empower people and educate people and ensure that they have good experiences, the best experiences that they can. And it’s rewarding to sit down on these podcasts and talk to other people who are doing such tremendous work, like you and your team. So it feels really wonderful to be loosely connected, a piece of an important puzzle. And as a single puzzle piece, I don’t think I could do anything meaningful. But together with other wonderful puzzle pieces, we can create a dynamic picture that yields results. And I think we’re seeing the results, slowly but surely.
Yes. And certainly, as you mentioned earlier, really opening up the every day mom and other parent figures – their eyes to what birth can be or what birth truly is versus the screaming mom who is rushing into the hospital, her water’s broken, and she has her baby and everything is chaotic. It’s not how a birth truly is in most cases. Between your streaming platform and having not only these stories, but sharing documentaries and your new fourth trimester project – that’s a web series within Informed Pregnancy Plus, so much good content, no matter how someone prefers to consume, whether it’s a podcast or watching videos, for example.
Yeah, you mentioned Ina May Gaskin and the stories in her book. Earlier in my career – I’ve been doing this for 20 years now – those were the people who seemed most inspired. And during their pregnancy when I would see them, they would seem most excited. I think there’s generally kind of a mix between nervousness and excitement when you get close to delivering your baby, but those were the people who seemed overwhelmingly excited and confident and a little bit nervous – fear of the unknown, especially for such a big event in your life. And it definitely served as a model. We recently had Ina May on the podcast, also, and it was just so inspiring to talk to her because she’s affected and empowered so many people. And I think a big piece of what inspires me to try to get stories out there is going back and seeing how positively Ina May’s stories affected our patients. One Way or a Mother is another way of trying to do that.
The streaming platform – we pulled together as many documentaries as I could get my hands on, and also, other tools like workshops and mind and body stuff, yoga workouts.
Yeah, our sleep class is on there, Tired as a Mother!
Yeah, your sleep class is popular on there! And I just started my own medication series called Ohm Mama.
I will check it out! I need to pop back into the platform!
We have a prenatal video podcast series, short form – ten minutes long – with a very dynamic mama. Her name is Gerrit Kazmaier.
I know Gerrit.
She had a really simple conception and pregnancy. She was healthy as could be. And then it ended there. She had a very challenging birth and an even more challenging, I think, postpartum experience. Then when she went to get pregnant again, an extremely challenging fertility experience. So we catch up with her very early, and she overcame that issue with fertility. We catch up with her very early, and the same thing, we’re just following her through her pregnancy in real time as she’s trying to process her last birth and postpartum experience and make a better one for herself. That’s Growing with Gerrit, which streams on Informed Pregnancy Plus.
And then the Fourth Tri – I’m very excited about, too, because I think as much as we all focus on better birth experiences, I find anyway a lacking of resources for preparing for postpartum before you get there. Which is generally hard to do because I don’t want to call postpartum a problem, but I would call it rocky terrain. It’s a big transition, and transitions are hard. If you drive on rocky terrain with the right vehicle, you can have the time of your life. But if you take your regular sedan on that rocky terrain, it’s not going to be a pleasant ride. So there’s preparation to do to get ready for that landscape and ready for that transition. And because you’re not in the rocky terrain, it’s hard to see that it’s important to put that effort in. I think the more ways we can reach people before they get to postpartum and to try to put things in place and prepare for a healthy transition, a smoother transition, it will be better for all units of that family. That’s where our web series The Fourth Tri comes from. We’ve been feverishly working and hope to push it out the door the next quarter. But The Fourth Tri follows a very dynamic mom through postpartum and every week of the 12 weeks, we give her something to do that’s meant to be therapeutic for her mind, body, or spirit. Not with the idea that everybody who watches this will do all of these 12 things, but just to give you exposure to things you could do that may be therapeutic and may be enjoyable, too, and might make the experience better.
So she does all these different things. We watch her do them, and we interview her about the experience and also the practitioners who provide them, about what those modalities are and how they can be helpful.
Excellent! So much goodness! So between your upcoming podcast, One Way or a Mother, and your current Informed Pregnancy Podcast, with the vulnerability of sharing stories, do any of your guests ever have regrets, being so vulnerable? Or when they sign on, are they in it for this content being out there for a lifetime?
I think at this point, most of our guests are people who have listened to the podcast, benefitted from the podcast, and are wholeheartedly all in on trying to pay it forward and help by sharing their experience to give other people the benefit that they got from the podcast. I definitely have, from time to time, will get online to do the after birth experience podcast, and it’s not a birth that went how they wanted, and I’ll feel – I don’t know if it’s hesitation or just some downheartedness about, okay, here we go, let’s hear this story. Especially if it’s like, this was a story I was hoping to not have.
The feedback has never been like, I don’t want to share this anymore. I think it almost becomes a more passionate, I need to share this.
Right. It can impact so many people, even if it wasn’t your original plan. Even more so, really.
I’m grateful to every single guest who comes on. It is a vulnerable thing to share in a public forum. I can’t control who listens to it, honestly, as we’re broadcasting. There are sometimes real negative people out there, haters. I remember when Amanda Seyfried came on and talked about the fact that she took her anxiety medication through her pregnancy and postpartum, and some trash blogger came out with a story about what a horrible thing to do and she’s poisoning her baby. It gained traction for a minute and was negative PR for her, and she’s in the public light, which your reputation is your career.
Aside from on a very personal level, nobody wants to be trashed in general, and certainly not on your decisions that you make as a mom. Like you said, extremely vulnerable and potentially backlashy. But I will say, every credible media source came out with a story that brought an expert on and validated that she did the exact right thing and really started to talk about how the medications have changed over time, and the safety data and information that we have, and perhaps the idea of a risk benefit analysis when you have two choices, looking at the risk and benefit of each choice, and then making a choice, not blind to the fact that it may have some downsides, but well aware of the fact that it’s a better choice. We’ve gotten feedback from mental health organizations and advocates and frankly people, moms, who are just so grateful for the fact that she shared that story and took away some of the judgment around it and made it so that people who might not have been interested in getting help because of the stigma reversed course and got help and had a much better experience.
Yeah, there’s a lot of vulnerability. I’m super grateful to every single person who comes onto the podcast to share their story in that public way. But in the end, it’s gratifying to them and fulfilling to them to have done it, as far as I know. And even those more challenging cases like Amanda’s, at the end of the day, she did a wonderful thing, and I think she feels good about having done it.
I remember listening to her story. It was very impactful. And it is important as a way to process – not that we are therapists, as podcast hosts, but to tell your story verbally. I tell my clients, if they don’t want to share it with a friend or their doula, to even write out their birth story. It can be very therapeutic. What are your thoughts on that?
I think absolutely, it’s a great way of processing your own experience. And truthfully, that’s another thing. It’s feedback that we get sometimes. Another person is Mandy Moore, who we interviewed before and after. She had an interesting complication that came up, a medical issue that came up right before she gave birth, so she had an interesting first birth. And we try to record as soon as possible after they have the story, similar to writing it down. And Mandy said to me, like six months after she had the baby, she was like, I listened to my birth story. I’m like, wow, I didn’t know any of that! There’s a little bit of a cloud, a daze, when you’re actually going through it. And I think a lot of it, naturally some of the details get blurred. So when she listened back to her own story, she’s like, wow, that’s a fascinating story. And I think that’s a general theme, that people are glad they did it because they have it forever to listen back to their own story, in a way that reminds them of their experience and their journey. It keeps it fresh.
And you mentioned in one of your first One Way or a Mother series, that the history, the family history was mentioned. So I think either sharing your story on a podcast or a video documentary of sorts or writing it down can be helpful for the future, for your children. It’s also just nice to look back on family history. You mentioned the mother’s birth and how that could potentially impact things and so on. I love it as a gift and also if the child is female, potentially how it could impact her birth.
That’s a really great point, Kristin. It must not be super common, because it surprises me when I’m talking just to my patients during their pregnancy, and they’ll know a lot of details about their own birth. And I think it’s really cool to have that information. And it’s really cool that they have that relationship with their mom where they’ve clearly sat and talked about it. But you’re right; to journal it, to document it, something that you can pass on. I think it probably creates an ancestral picture of childbirth over time, which is valuable and interesting.
It is. Well, this has been an amazing conversation. I look forward to chatting with you again in the future! I would love for you to share how our listeners can connect with you on social media, your website, and all the different platforms.
All right. Informed Pregnancy has access to all of our media and information about all of our media and where you can find it.
Informed Pregnancy TV takes you directly to Informed Pregnancy Plus where you can stream all of those documentaries and other birth content, the web series, the classes, like your amazing class and more. And it has apps on Apple, Android, and Roku so you can stream from any device seamlessly. We try to make it really inexpensive. The whole idea is accessibility. It doesn’t matter where you are and as long as you have an internet connection and, like, 20 cents a day, you can access all of the content on the subscription library.
And then on social media, we’re @doctorberlin.
Excellent! Well, thank you so much, and I can’t wait to start listening to One Way or a Mother!
Thanks, Kristin, and thanks for having me on again and also, once again, for the incredible work that you do.
I feel like you are just on the cutting edge of the industry; I have so much respect for you. Thank you for sharing your wisdom!
IMPORTANT LINKS
Birth and postpartum support from Gold Coast Doulas