The doula’s purpose is to help women have a safe, memorable and empowering birthing experience. They are professionally trained in childbirth to provides emotional, physical and informational support to the mother who is expecting, is experiencing labor, or has recently given birth. Women have been serving other women in childbirth for many centuries and have proven that support from another woman has a positive impact on the labor process. The word doula is a Greek word meaning women’s servant. I knew that our doula would remind me of the tools I had to self-advocate for that birth, and she did! But I was informed and hopeful for a natural birth. Had I not learned as much as I did in that class, I would have just blindly trusted any old doctor as well. I definitely can’t fault that way of thinking. After all, it’s the first baby (or second or third) for the mom and the doctor has delivered presumably hundreds. In most cases, the default reaction of a mother-to-be (especially a first timer) is to just do whatever the doctor says. We weren’t going to pretend like we knew exactly what to do and that we had it covered. My husband would be there of course, but this was his first birth too. The decision came to hire our Bradley Method instructor when I realized I would have a lot going on as it is, birthing a baby for the first time, let alone trying to remember everything she taught us at the right time. I was on the fence about having a doula until the last few weeks of pregnancy. As it turns out, hiring a doula for that birth was one of the best decisions I ever made. Prior to becoming pregnant with our first, i had never heard of a doula.