Tuesday, March 17, 2009

Dar a Luz Network in the News

Dar a Luz Network Chapters in the Dayton, Ohio area have been busy with fun outreach and fundraising activities. Two of the recent events were featured on the local news! You can check out the newsclips here:




Friday, December 19, 2008

Mail a letter, support midwives

Dar a Luz just learned that the United States Postal Service is offering a commemorative postage stamp benefiting the American College of Nurse Midwives. These beautiful stamps are available for order on the USPS website or you visit the link here. What a wonderful way to pay tribute to these amazing and important women while paying a bill or mailing a holiday card as well as an opportunity to bring awareness to the role midwives play in pregnancy and birth.

Wednesday, December 10, 2008

Holiday Shopping Made Easy


The folks at Business of Being Born partnered up with Moby Wrap to create this beautiful new baby carrier to benefit the Coalition for Improving Maternity Services. If you are looking for a gift for a new mom or mom to be, this is it. For more information on the wrap you can go here. For more information on babywearing, check out a past post on the subject. As a newly expecting mom of #2, I will definately be putting one of these on my list for Santa.

Happy Holidays (and happy babywearing)!

Thursday, November 20, 2008

Doulas as part of YOUR birth team

This morning' Today Show aired a segment about the role a doula can play in a woman's birth plan and experience. My feeling, unfortunately, is that the segment played mostly to the medical community (calling the doctor and L&D nurse the head of a mother's team) and once again downplayed a woman's right to be educated and or make choices about her birth experience. Dr. Nancy Snyderman suggested a woman interested in hiring a doula check with her doctor first and introduce your doula to your physician during a prenatal appointment. A doctor whose hospital has banned the use of doulas during births was interviewed because she and the hospital administration felt a doula's presence too often interfered in mother's making the "right choice" during birth. Not once did the segment mention our culture's Cesarean rate of 30% and the fact that having a doula present can significantly lower that rate for individual women. Many laboring women (not all, however, to be fair) were pictured in hospital gowns and hooked to IV's in a hospital bed.

The fact is having a doula can be a wonderful way to empower yourself during your birth and have additional emotional and hands on support for you and your birth partner. Another fact is that if you are having a birth attended by an OB in a hospital setting, chances are you will be laboring on your own without the presence of a physician (who may or may not be the primary physician of your prenatal care) with intermittent visits from a labor and deliver nurse.
Dar a Luz Network's motto of "Knowledge, Power and Support" encourages women to educate themselves and make informed choices about the type of birth that is appropriate for you and your family. This include the decision to hire and locate a doula. DONA is an excellent organization to find referrals for a doula in your area. You, as the pregnant mother are the head of your birth team and it is important to find team members that are in line and in support of what you choose during your birth.

Wednesday, October 8, 2008

More From the Red Tent

At our event, we asked women to share their personal thoughts about birth, either from their own personal experience or their birth philosophy. This is what they shared.


"I do believe they come when they are ready- but I also believe they come when the mother is at peace...you have to believe in your heart that there is nothing to fear."


"Anything can happen, but it is still a miracle...it is still a birth."


"Birthing is surrendering to the amazing power that we carry deep within us."

"Through desire we conceive
By deception we preconceive
With our strength we deliver
Because of of our sisterhood we survive."

"The expectation has nothing to do with the reality"

"EMPOWERING"

"She found who she is"

"You cannot conquer birth until you surrender to it"

"To get something you never had, you have to do something you never did."

"I was reborn as my daughter was born"

"Births happen, they are not planned"


Monday, September 22, 2008

The Power of a Circle

Our Dayton, Oh area chapters, which includes the original Kettering chapter, hosted a BOLD Red Tent event on September 13th. We gathered at Practice Yoga, an area studio where many of our DaL moms take prenatal and baby and me yoga. This space proved to be ideal as the energy of pregnant and women who had recently given birth surrounded us all as we shared our stories, our joys, our pain, our tears. It was a magically cathartic evening and each of us left more complete yet more vulnerable as we honored each birth for the complicated, individual and transformative experience bringing life into this world is for the woman who becomes a mother.

If you have the opportunity to attend an event in a BOLD Red Tent, I encourage you to take it. The theory that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts is evident when women gather together to honor the experiences that only we as women have. The force created transcends the space we are in, the strength we see in each other mirrors the strength we bury within ourselves.

Friday, August 29, 2008

Birth on Labor Day

This Labor Day weekend marks the unofficial end of Summer but also marks the unofficial start of BOLD season. BOLD is the movement created by Karen Brody to heighten awareness for the need to make maternity care choices more mother centered as well as honor the birth experiences of all women. BOLD events are held in communities with the individual efforts focused on the birth culture in each area. I am excited to be attending a showing of Karen Brody's Birth this evening, a play touted as the "Vagina Monologues for Birth" and Dar a Luz is pleased to be sponsoring BOLD Red Tent events within a number of our chapters in the upcoming weeks.

If you have plans to attend a BOLD event in the near future, let us know. We'd love for you to share your experience with us.