Trenton-area expectant parents gain valued assistance from doulas during pregnancy, at delivery and afterward

While awareness of doulas has been growing steadily, many people mistakenly think that a doula’s role ends at delivery.

Accompanying an expectant parent to a prenatal visit.
Being a constant, comforting presence throughout childbirth, offering a squeeze of the hand or a word of encouragement at just the right moment.
Holding a fussing baby so a parent can get some much-needed sleep.

Deyonna Pope, an advanced perinatal doula and senior case manager for Trenton-based Children’s Futures.

Doulas provide all those services and more, said Deyonna Pope. “We do what it takes to provide expectant parents with the support, information and resources needed to have the best pregnancy and childbirth experience that they can. We also work to ensure that clients can advocate for themselves, so that they can express their questions, concerns and preferences to health care providers and have their wishes honored as far as is possible,” explained Pope, a certified perinatal doula who serves as senior case manager for Children’s Futures.

Children’s Futures provides no-charge doula services to people of color living in Trenton in an effort to improve maternal and child health in the city. The nonprofit organization offers the services in partnership with Trenton Health Team — a regional health hub working to improve the health and well-being of the greater Trenton community — and several allied organizations through the Safer Childbirth Cities initiative.

Pope and her fellow doulas at Children’s Futures tailor their role to each client’s specific needs, she explained. In some cases, she notes, this may mean helping a pregnant woman formulate a question for her obstetric provider about a concern or worry. During childbirth, it can involve helping a client move into a more comfortable position for delivery or consider her options for pain management. In the first weeks or months after a baby is born, a doula can offer instruction and encouragement for breastfeeding or provide a respite to an exhausted mother or father.

While awareness of doulas has been growing steadily, many people mistakenly think that a doula’s role ends at delivery. “We are here for our clients, their babies and their families from pregnancy, through childbirth and for the first months of a baby’s life,” Pope said. “At Children’s Futures, our support for clients and their families extends to the baby’s second birthday,” she added, noting that there are both male and female doulas in the community, with the men offering support and information to fathers.

Three Things Doulas Don’t Do

For all that doulas do, it’s also worth noting what they don’t do.

First, while they are highly trained and certified professionals, they are not health care providers, as physicians, certified nurse midwives and nurses are. So, while they provide pregnant clients and new parents with support and information, they do not offer medical advice or care.

Second, they do not tell their clients what to do or make decisions for them, Pope noted. “Respecting and enhancing a client’s autonomy is at the heart of the doula’s role. Our job is to provide the information, support and encouragement needed to empower clients to advocate for themselves and their children,” she said.

Third, the doula does not take the place of any other person in the client’s life, such as a spouse or partner, mother, sibling or aunt. “Some of our clients do not have a support system of family and friends available to them. Others are fortunate to have one or many people there to provide help. In both cases, we ‘stand in the gap’ in terms of helping to fulfill unmet needs, but we do not ‘stand in the way’ of relationships or usurp anyone’s role,” Pope said, explaining that a client’s partner or mother sometimes can have initial concerns in this regard.

Want to learn more about how doulas can help during pregnancy, labor and delivery, and beyond? Tune into the NJ.com Facebook page at 1 p.m. Nov. 16 for a group discussion on an innovative program to help expectant and new parents and their babies in Mercer County’s communities of color. Presented by Trenton Health Team.

Insights from Being A Doula and Receiving Doula Care

When Pope talks about the help a doula can provide, she speaks both as a person who has served as a doula for five years and as a woman who benefitted from doula care during pregnancy, childbirth and the first months of life of both her son and infant daughter.

“From both perspectives, I can say that doulas can make a tremendous difference throughout pregnancy, during childbirth and after you come home with your baby,” she said.

Her insights into the importance of providing expectant parents, new parents and their children with needed support are based not only on her work as a perinatal doula, reproductive health doula and lactation consultant, but also from her earliest childhood memories and from two critical experiences.

“My grandmother was one of 17 children and was very active in doing community work. So with our large family, I was always surrounded by new mothers and babies as I grew up, and my grandmother’s example instilled in me a desire to help others,” she explained.

Two difficult incidents helped to focus that instinct for service on expectant parents and their children.

During her college studies at the Art Institute of Philadelphia, Pope was walking in the Center City area one day when she encountered a woman who appeared to have mental health or substance use issues. The woman also was in labor. While most people went out of their way to avoid her, Pope approached the woman, offered support, called an ambulance and rode in the ambulance with her to the hospital.

Then, in 2016, Pope lost a cousin to preeclampsia, a pregnancy-related condition marked by high blood pressure and, in its severe form, kidney damage, organ failure and even death.

“It was a huge shock to me. I didn’t think of that happening anymore,” Pope said of her cousin’s death. That loss, as well as her experience with the woman on the streets of Philadelphia, prompted her to act on her longstanding interest in supporting parents and children and to become a doula.

Children’s Futures has male as well as female doulas, with the men offering support and information to fathers.

An Urgent Need to Improve Maternal and Newborn Health in Trenton

Tragically, the loss of women to preeclampsia and to other pregnancy-related conditions such as postpartum hemorrhage does still happen, and not just in distant countries or remote regions of the United States, but right here in New Jersey.

In fact, in 2018, New Jersey ranked 47^th among the nation’s states and territories in terms of maternal mortality. Today, the state’s ranking has improved to 29^th, but far more gains are needed, particularly for people of color, who are disproportionately affected by maternal illness and death.

A few statistics for New Jersey, Mercer County and Trenton provide a sense of how much more progress is required:

In New Jersey, the rate of pregnancy-related deaths is 6.6 times higher among Black, non-Hispanic women than it is for white, non-Hispanic women.
Mercer County ranks last among New Jersey’s 21 counties in terms of the percentage of pregnant people who start receiving care in the first trimester.
In Trenton, Black non-Hispanic people giving birth have a 13.1% rate of preterm birth, compared to an 8.6% rate for people from other racial/ethnic groups. They also are twice as likely as others to have a child with a low birth weight, and they are at greater risk for having an unplanned Cesarean section and for having their newborn admitted to the neonatal intensive care unit because of health problems.

Doulas are not health care professionals. They do not diagnose or treat medical conditions. But by helping expectant parents make prenatal care appointments, by going with clients to those visits, by encouraging clients to ask questions about a worrisome symptom and in dozens of other ways large and small, they can help pregnant clients seek and obtain the information and care they need to protect their health and that of their babies.

That’s why Children’s Futures, Trenton Health Team and other groups are partnering to offer no-charge doula services to people of color in Trenton.

And that’s why Pope urges people who are pregnant or who are preparing for pregnancy to contact her at 609-695-1977 to arrange for those no-cost services.

*******

Future articles in this series will share the story of a Trenton woman who benefitted from the services of a doula and highlight how women can access various birth control options following delivery.

To learn more about the Safer Childbirth Cities initiative, contact Trenton Health Team at 609-256-4555 or visit trentonhealthteam.org.