About Rebecca

My interest in birth started as the oldest of five adopted children with questions about pregnancy, recognizing that babies come to families in many dynamic capacities. The concept of pregnancy and newborn care was both foreign and exciting. I understood at a young age that caring for others would play an important part in my future endeavors. I realized my passion for advocacy and interest in women’s access to health information in high school through volunteer work. I chose to major in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies in college, working with and learning directly from practitioners in health and advocacy fields, leading to the completion of DONA Birth Doula training in 2008 and a B.A. in Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies from the University of Cincinnati. I have been assisting pregnant people through fertility, loss, pregnancy, and delivery since my DONA certification in 2008.

After experiencing recurrent miscarriages and preterm labor and delivery on my journey toward motherhood, I turned to the expertise of my local doula community to provide support and knowledge. Even as a trained doula with experience working with many families, I felt lost in the medical conversations surrounding my body. I was unfamiliar with procedures and medications that were used outside the scope of typical pregnancies. It was a new language for me to decipher. These experiences and the knowledge attained through them reaffirmed the importance of my work in the birth community, specifically the encompassing work of full-spectrum doula care, or whole life doula care. I feel deeply that there is a need to hold space for women and families that confront the hardships of trauma in pregnancy and birth. I see pregnancy through a trauma-informed lens and look forward to continuing to support families with these practices in mind.

I also recognize the blessings that pregnancy and birth truly are. It is a time of profound importance in the development of self and family and an experience to be cherished and celebrated.

My experiences with loss in pregnancy and the loss of a baby who spent only hours alive encouraged me to examine my relationship with death. This was not the first time I had experienced death in a traumatic setting and I knew there was a great deal of healing for me to do in this space. My birth work informed my ability to look at each of my encounters with death through an individualized lens. I learned that along with my healing through different therapeutic avenues, a large part of my understanding of the end of life would come through shared experiences. My deep empathic connection with people led me to palliative and hospice care. I trained through Hospice of Cincinnati to sit vigil, sharing the last moments of life with folks in hospice care.  We all experience loss of some type in life. It is a collective experience that represents the cyclical nature of existence. We all also experience the end of life differently.  This ranges from the death of a loved one, the end of your own life, and the ending of a relationship, to list a few.  These are all intimate moments that bring years of stories, memories, and commitments to the forefront to be examined. I found so much fulfillment in sharing these moments with my hospice clients and their families. I knew that this was an important part of my ability to offer a full spectrum of care as a doula. 

I see labor, delivery, and postpartum care, along with end-of-life planning and vigil sitting as a communal action, one where I am invited into a most personal and cherished time in a person’s life and allowed the access to assist in the arrival of a new life and the completion of a life well-lived.

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I look forward to hearing your story ♥️