How a Catholic Doula Helps You Integrate Faith into Your Birth
If you’re a Catholic mom wondering if you should add a Catholic doula to your birth team, you absolutely should! It’s important to build a birth team of supportive people who will have your back at your labor and birth. This team usually looks like your husband, a birth doula, and possibly another supportive birth partner (a relative or friend). We already know that adding a doula to your team improves birth outcomes. The key is to find a doula who aligns really well with you, and faith is an important component to consider. A Catholic doula will not only understand your faith, but share it, and this shared characteristic can strengthen your relationship and enhance doula care prenatally, at the birth, and postpartum.
A Catholic Doula Connects You with Catholic Resources and Helps You Plan
Prenatally, a Catholic doula connects you with specifically Catholic resources to enrich your pregnancy and help you plan for birth. She can suggest Catholic books to read such as Made for This: The Catholic Mom’s Guide to Birth by Mary Haseltine or Nine Months with God & Your Baby: Spiritual Preparation for Birth by Eline Landon. She can also recommend Catholic books that will prepare you for the postpartum period. A Catholic doula helps you consider if there is a patron saint of childbirth or midwives that you may want to cultivate a devotion to such as Saint Brigid of Kildare or Saint Raymond Nonnatus. Your Catholic doula can provide you with information on Catholic rituals available to pregnant or postpartum mothers, which aren’t always broadly known or talked about in Catholic culture. For example, you could consider the Order for the Blessing of Parents Before Childbirth or Order for the Blessing of a Mother Before Childbirth.
Bringing Faith to the Birth Space
A Catholic doula will help you think about how to bring your faith into the birth space. Whether it be contemplating which comforting Catholic items to bring such as holy water, an image of Jesus or Mary, a rosary, or a crucifix, or if you’re considering Catholic birth affirmations and rosary audio for your birth, a Catholic doula talks you through ideas and helps put them into action at the birth.
She can also pray with you and for you throughout the process. She can remind you to unite your suffering to Jesus’s suffering on the cross and to offer your suffering up. These are distinctly Catholic concepts, and it’s nice to have someone on your birth team that knows them and understands them.
During the postpartum period, she’ll help you adjust and connect you with more Catholic community resources and support. If desired, you could invite her to the baby’s baptism. Essentially, a Catholic birth doula helps you steep yourself more fully in the Catholic tradition, and she walks alongside you as you do it. This makes for a lovely bond.
Contact me today for a free consultation
I’m Emma Pence, a Certified Birth Doula and Pediatric Sleep Consultant in the Lansing, MI area. I want to help you have your best birth! If you’re looking for a birth doula, please reach out for a free 30 minute consultation today at emma@littlelambdoula.com!
