Support Your Local Medical Student!

I have a bumper sticker which reads "Support Your Local Midwife". I love the sticker's message and agree with it 100%. I also believe we, birth activists, need to support our local medical students, doulas, CBEs, OBs, Family Doctors, L&D Nurses etc. We need to seek out the providers in our area who support normal birth and give them business and send them business. We need to talk to doulas and get their cards to hand out to any pregnant women we see. We need to find the GOOD hospital childbirth educators and refer people to their classes. (Lets face it, most people are more likely to take a hospital class than a private class). We need to bring goodies to the L&D Nurse who worked so hard to help a mother have a good birth. We need to support those we know who are going to go or who are in medical school...tell them they can do it and ask what we can do to help them.

Why must we do this? Because these people can't hear these things enough or have enough done for them. We fight an up hill battle in all we do for birthing women. We put our lives on hold, ask our families to deal with so much all for people they don't know. We face nay-sayers and those who think we are delusional constantly. On top of that, we deal with our own self doubt. Is is worth it? Will I really be able to make a difference?

We need to be told we can and will make a difference! We need to be told we are not crazy! We need people to ask us what they can do for us to help us defend birth!

Those of us who are trying to make a change often find ourselves marching to the beat of our own drum. Some of us may start to lose our rhythm and need others to march with us to remind us why we're marching in the first place.