September 9, 2025
Your Doula Is Not The Decider of Your Birth Experience: Podcast Episode #307
In this solo episode of Ask the Doulas podcast, Kristin Revere of Gold Coast Doulas shares her thoughts on the role of a birth and postpartum doula.
Hello, hello! This is Kristin Revere with a very special solo episode today to discuss the role of a doula in your birth and postnatal phase.
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So let’s get into our topic! We have been getting questions from clients about the doula’s role, and even when I do the matchmaking, as owner of Gold Coast Doulas, there is a little bit of misinformation out there about what a doula does and doesn’t do. So we are not here to dictate how your birth should go, the plan that you create, or as I like to say, birth preferences, and how you choose to feed your baby or parent your baby.
I know when I started out as a new doula over 12 years ago with the first training I went through, I felt like I was a failure if my client’s plan changed in any way from what their original wishes were. For example, if they wanted an unmedicated birth and they ended up having to get Pitocin to help with contractions or have any other interventions, like an epidural, then I used to track. I had a chart and I tracked every sort of intervention, whether it was induction or an epidural that wasn’t by request, or again, Pitocin, nitrous, whatever it might be, and felt like if things didn’t go the way they wanted, then it was somehow my responsibility.
And after my first certification, I went through a whole different birth doula training and later postpartum doula training through a different organization, and that organization taught me that it isn’t the doula’s role to really navigate decision-making for clients or be at fault if things go a different way. Our role is to support our clients without judgment for whatever their choices are. And sometimes they choose personally – it isn’t chosen for them due to their own health or baby’s health, with any interventions that may come – a client may choose to get an epidural if their labor was too uncomfortable and the comfort measures and hip squeezes were not working for them.
So that definitely was a game changer in my book to go into it with a different mentality and stop tracking all of the different changes in birth plans and attune with them and be with my clients without judgment. Now, with my own two births, I may have made different choices personally than many of my clients. Same goes with how I fed my babies and how I parented. That isn’t my choice to control or dictate how my client’s birth goes. When I started in the industry, there were doulas in my area that only supported home births or only supported unmedicated home or hospital birthers. And there were some that loved working with epidural clients and so those clients chose that particular doula, or if they had a particular childbirth method that they were preparing with – say, Bradley or HypnoBirthing – then they hired a doula who was able to better support them. But when I started Gold Coast Doulas ten years ago, we had the focus that our clients are able to make their own informed choices. We are there to support as long as things are not safe. Now, our team will not attend unassisted home births, so there has to be a midwife present in order for us to safely support clients. We will support any choices, whether it’s a planned surgical birth or a client who wants an epidural right when they get to the hospital or a birth center birth, medicated or unmedicated, depending on the policy of that particular center, and a home birth or an unmedicated hospital birth. It’s our clients’ choices, as long as things are safe.
And when it comes to feeding or newborn procedures, we don’t have a voice. We give evidence-based information, resources like our breastfeeding class and different breastfeeding and postpartum support groups in the area and also nationally. That is our role, to connect our clients to resources, to evidence-based articles, so they can have conversations with their OB or their midwife or their pediatrician or lactation consultant if any questions arise. But we should not dictate how a birth goes or how a client chooses to feed or parent their baby.
I know when I hired doulas with my second birth, my doula had a particular stance on some different newborn procedures and feeding choices, and I felt like in order to work with her, I had to agree to her personal stances or her practice stances. So I did ask a lot of questions and later felt like that was not the way I wanted to practice and that my clients could make any decisions on the choices that are very personal to their family when it comes to newborn procedures or choosing to breastfeed or not. Of course, we give information about the importance of skin to skin and the initial feed, but we certainly do not have a say, and that helps us to better support.
And then when it comes to postpartum doulas, or that follow up postpartum visit that our birth doulas have, then we are able to, again, give resources on feeding or healing after the birth and safe sleep. My doula agency with newborn care specialists and day and overnight postpartum doulas does focus on safe sleep and educating our clients on what is safe sleep and what is not. We will not encourage family members to hold their baby while they’re feeling drowsy on the couch or to use some of those stationary naps or pads or have their child asleep in their home in their car seat and not do a transfer. So we do have firm positions when a doula is in the home, and then we educate our clients on what they do when we’re not in the home.
But again, we’re all about supporting without judgment, and if our client chooses to exclusively pump, then we can refer them to, say, our pumping class or some support groups for pumping moms. Or if they have questions about the best formula for their baby and want to know about bottles or pacifiers, then we’re able to give them appropriate information. But there is a misconception that doulas are only for unmedicated births or only for attachment parenting or only for breastfeeding moms, and some doulas may operate that way, but not at Gold Coast Doulas. We are all about supporting our clients where they’re at and giving them information to best make those informed decisions.
A doula is not a medical professional. We are nonmedical. Now, there are some doulas on my team who are registered nurses, but they don’t act in that scope when they’re at a visit, and if one of our doulas is a certified lactation consultant, they are operating as a doula during that shift, and a client can then contract with them to have a separate lactation visit. So we do have a lot of boundaries so we’re able to fully support in that special role of a birth or postpartum doula or even offering bedrest support to clients with our antepartum team.
So that is a bit about my own personal feelings, that your doula, if you’re interviewing doulas, should not base their own personal experience with birth or parenting or feeding their baby as a way to how they would guide clients, because we shouldn’t dictate the choices that our clients make, as long as they are safe, again, with not attending unassisted births, supporting safe sleep, and even with our doulas who are supporting formula feeding families, we’re going to follow the instructions on the bottle.
I would love to hear your take on all of this: what you have heard about doulas, what your doula’s role in your own birth or postpartum journey was, and if they ended up giving you their own opinions or their philosophy and if that impacted the choices you made like when I hired a doula and how it impacted some of my choices.
Take good care, and feel free to reach out to us on Instagram, Facebook, or send us an email on our website.
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