What is a birthkeeper? A birthkeeper is someone who is reclaiming birth from the medical industrial complex.

Birthkeepers may or may not be doulas or midwives, and may or may not be officially credentialed.

However, birthkeepers are women (yes, women) who recognize that the current system is deeply damaging.

Instead of continuing to work within the system, and witness the re-traumatization of mothers while "holding space" - birthkeepers are calling bullshit and teaching women how to take back their power.

A doula working within scope is always walking a thin line between what her clients need and want, and what she knows the medical system expects from her (i.e. cooperation and compliance, to stay out of their way).

Doulas are often relegated to the role of peacemaker.

For a long time, I’ve reckoned with the peacemaker version of mySelf…the ‘me’ I conjured up in order to survive in a world where I was just too much.

After my epic freebirth in 2011, my 5th baby - I knew, bone-deep, that trusting birth, trusting women, and trusting the mother-baby connection that spans across time is REAL.

The Truth about birth is that it's inherently safe, in all its primal, raw, rule-defying wildness.

And yet…as I moved from fierce freebirthing mother into the role of a mama who needed to make a living, I realized that a lot of traditional doulas regarded me as a strange anomaly.