Birth Doula Support
You deserve the best care available, a birth doula at your back and by your side, and a safe, positive birth experience.
I’m so glad you found your way here. I’m Sara Nolan, labor doula, birth story keeper, educator and step/mom, whose deepest work is to support you as you navigate pregnancy, birth and become a parent, some of the most significant, imprinting experiences of your lifetime.
Childbirth is a time when everything can shift without paradigm! Birthing people prepare to face the unknown and unexpected regardless, and your doula helps you across small and large crossroads. I meet you there with skill, sensitivity and education, with humor (yes!) and heart.
No matter your chosen place or means of birth, you can be accompanied and supported in your labor by a skilled, sensitive doula. The most important things in my doula bag are energetic anchors and profound respect for you— and of course jasmine tea, jokes, and all the studies.
I offer continuous and lavish support to ALL pregnant and birthing people, regardless of birthing location or identities. This ensures you are NEVER alone in your labor and immediate postpartum period, while following all safety guidelines. You will get the preparation, information, energetic presence and support you need to navigate your birth with trust and confidence.
Please contact me to set up a complimentary consultation call or video meet (over Zoom or Facetime session) and learn about service and pricing.
Phone: 917 648 7745. Email: sara@essayintensive.com.
I am trained in Whole Heart Communication, which helps your (and my) nervous system shift into calm, open state, suitable for informed decision making and feeling connected and capable.
What does a Birth Doula Do?
This pivotal moment in your life story is a big deal: experiencing your pregnancy, birthing your child, and transitioning to new parenthood.
I offer you unwavering support, practical, educational and emotional, as you do you: navigate pregnancy, prepare for childbirth and postpartum period, undergo the reality of your labor, and begin life as a parent to this newborn– with or without a partner.
Whether planning to birth in hospital, birthing center or home, birthing as a couple or single, with or without pain medication, your present needs and preferences are where we start. I offer non-judgmental, unbiased, informed and intuitive service.
Labor is not a episode; it changes your life forever. How you approach it, and how you feel about your support, can affect you in powerful ways going forward.
We explore your choices and develop your tools— which also matter for the long-haul of parenting and coping with life’s challenges, whether joyful or distressing.
All birthing people deserve this, and improved labor outcomes show it makes a critical difference to have a doula present.
Read testimonials here.
Ready to talk? 30 minute phone and in person consultations available. Please call to book: 917 648 7745 or email sara at essayintensive dot com to set something up.
If a doula were a drug, it would be unethical not to use it. – John Kennell, M.D.
How Your Doula Supports You
A doula stands with a laboring person on the threshold of the unknown and allows her to access her strength by staying with her body in the present moment. It requires more courage and strength than possibly anything else a pregnant person has even done; including the flexibility and fortitude to embrace what is happening rather than getting caught up in wishes or stories about what has or will happen. You cannot prepare for birth absolutely because you never know what birth you will get. But you can prepare to be in the unknown, to be seen and heard in the birth room, and to communicate your changing needs with your team.
This is the critical work I help you do.
I am also your second brain. You absorb what you can in your own education process, your only job in birth is to be in the moment. I remember your childbirth class info for you, while you focus on your birthing process or your partner. I offer you suggestions and physical relief for comfort. Perhaps most importantly, I help you generate the critical relaxation response amidst the intensity of physical and emotional sensations of labor.
You are not alone, and yet you are utterly alone– the paradox of birth. All women should feel that they have been central participants, celebrated and respected in their own labors, and that they have received all the support and nurturing they needed at this transformative, vulnerable time.
I do not judge your birth choices, or make decisions for you. I will never push an agenda or vision; but help you clarify, articulate and accept yours. I help you find up to date, evidence-based information, and understand your rights as a birthing person.
I will also teach you basics about self-care and newborn care, and have innumerable local resources for you as your needs change and new situations arise.
Your Birth Story
As an add-on postpartum service, I write up your narrative of the birth of your child with you: you narrate, I ask guiding questions. I write it all down, and later craft it with carefully honed writer’s eye, edit and format. Telling and documenting your story can be an amazing and often healing experience, one families rarely find time for otherwise. It is therapeutic (and emotional) to dedicate that time to reflect, process, preserve and find meaning. Sessions take place in person, or over video or phone.
Many families choose to hire photographers for their births; these artists make choices about what is represented in order to capture essence and detail and augment emotion and action. I do this same thing for you, but in words.
The story will be in your voice, but enriched with my writer’s ear and sensibility and unbiased outside perspective, as well as my years of experience helping people shape their stories into something resonant, and artful. The end product, which can be paired with photographs, will communicate the unique powerfulness, emotion and sequence of this major life event.
Families can hire me for this story-crafting service even years out from actual childbirth, whether or not I attended your birth personally–but the memories often grow fuzzier, so it’s ideal to tell your story as close to the birth as possible.
And before your kid is embarrassed by hearing the story, they may be obsessed.
Cost: $395, and sliding scale rates available. I offer pay what you can birth story services periodically, and whenever I can to those who self-identify as belonging to groups that have been systematically silenced.
How I Got Into This
At 11 years old, I would beg my best friend’s mom, a midwife, to bring me along to a birth. She never did. Instead, I poured over the pictures of laboring bodies in books– the more graphic and honest the better.
I had to wait 14 more years to attend my first birth, when I was the birth partner to a friend who had opted to get pregnant on her own.
We did a complete childbirth class with the No BS genius Erica Lyon– my sharpest memory was her sticking her head through a stuffed replica of the female pelvis and chanting, YOU CANNOT FAIL AT BIRTH! THE GOAL OF BIRTH IS THE BABY COMES OUT!
She’s right. But many woman fear they will fail themselves; this fear can be shifted to confidence.
First Labor
However the baby gets out, one of the most profound things in the world is one body emerging from another. That first birth, I held– as I have done many times since– the laboring woman’s thigh while witnessing and narrating for her the baby’s head advancing and retreating (they don’t tell you it retreats– it can!). Encouragement and validation are key; despite numbness from her medication, she could and would push her baby out and meet her. The veil of the universe had been parted briefly, as it is at every birth, no matter how the baby exits. Hair, more hair, more hair, and suddenly, a human being, absolutely new to the world, and a woman, now a mother, shaking, crying and taking her first breath of parenthood.
It was actually breath-taking, in all its fluid glory.
I took my first training course with CAPPA, hooked.
My Childbirth
Years later, my own childbirth a planned home-birth with a CNM, ended after 29 hours with an emergency transfer for fetal distress and a cord prolapse (a very rare true emergency)– A STAT caesarian saved my son’s life. This taught me the utter necessity of a laboring person staying open to the unpredictable, changing nature of birth, and how critical it is to develop the inner reserves to face birth as it is actually occurring. As a result, I am committed to supporting women through c-sections and adapting their birth preferences when the unexpected occurs.
I wrote an essay about one part of it, and it was published at Manifest Station. You can read it here.
Contact Me
You can enter labor and parenthood present, powerful and with a good sense of humor, with as many tools and as much evidence-based information as I can offer.
30 minute free consultations available. Please call or email to book: 917 648 7745.
Prefer to contact by email first? Write to me at sara at essayintensive dot com (yes, essayintensive is one word!) or fill out this form.
What Is The Cost for Labor Doula Birth Support?
Contact me for pricing information and complete service descriptions for the Birth Doula Bundle (+ Limited sliding scale options!). This includes prenatal and postpartum visits, support throughout your labor, and being on-call for you for 5 weeks around your estimated due date (EDD). You also receive help with initiating newborn feeding and a feeding plan, and unlimited phone and email contact in the week following your delivery.
Details of package explained at initial consult.
If cost is an issue, please let me know. I offer limited spots each year at sliding scale, or I can refer you to another wonderful doula.
Lactation and Feeding Support available. $350 per 2-3 hour visit; includes written follow up with care plan, and followup at 24-48 hours. Sliding scale for those experiencing financial hardship.
Informed by years of experience and trainings in Spinning Babies, Yoga & Guided Relaxation, and as an Infant Feeding and Lactation Specialist (Manhattan Birth).
What About That College Savings Plan?
A special offer from my other skill-set: Because I believe in the long-haul, all my labor clients get a free draft review of their baby’s college essay, when the time comes, in 17 years or so, You use the coupon code: YOUWERETHEDOULAWHEN.
My Incredible Teachers
My list is sprawling, but to start: Ana Hill, Rocky Mountain Doula (CAPPA); Kristy Zandrozny, Expecting NYC (CAPPA); Birdsong Brooklyn; Jacqueline Levine, my breastfeeding and best evidence in birth mentor (may she rest in power); Mary Esther Malloy, Mindful Birth; the families who chose to have me at their births or shared their birth stories with me; my breath for always showing me where to start, my son and daughter, for making it here with exuberant willfulness; my stepsons, for beginning my journey as a parent; my generous parents, for, you know, doing it without a doula; my husband, John, who is incredible at taking the long view no matter what. And to the community of doulas near and far who seem to have everyone’s back.