March 30, 2025
Balancing Knowledge and Intuition: Birth Insights with Dr. Elliot Berlin of Informed Pregnancy Media
Dr. Elliot Berlin transforms how we view childbirth, challenging the check-box mentality that leaves many parents feeling they've failed when birth veers from their rigid plans. Through our conversation, he introduces a revolutionary alternative: approaching birth planning as a flow chart with multiple potential pathways rather than a single desired route.
The discussion delves into the delicate balance between modern medical systems and our innate bodily wisdom. As Dr. Berlin explains, "You're not driving a precision automobile, you're in a hot air balloon" – a perfect metaphor for the need to surrender some control while maintaining agency during birth. His insights on choosing birth environments are particularly illuminating: "If you're buying a hospital ticket, you're going on a hospital ride," highlighting how critical it is to select providers and settings aligned with your birth philosophy.
Perhaps most eye-opening is the exploration of how cultural disconnection from natural birth has left us with only dramatized media portrayals as reference points. This cultural void creates unnecessary fear and unrealistic expectations. Dr. Berlin compares it to forming impressions about air travel solely from disaster movies – we'd be terrified to fly if our only exposure came from Hollywood!
The conversation also explores the disappearing art of vaginal breech delivery and how chiropractic care creates optimal conditions for babies to assume head-down positions naturally. Dr. Berlin's holistic approach addresses not just physical alignment but the emotional journey through pregnancy and birth.
Whether you're planning your first birth or processing a previous experience, this episode offers profound wisdom to help you navigate choices with confidence and flexibility. Follow Dr. Berlin's new podcast "One Way or a Mother" for deep-dive birth stories told across multiple episodes, and explore resources at informedpregnancy.com.
Check out Dr. Berlin on instagram: https://www.instagram.com/doctorberlin/
Join the Bump & Beyond Online Community for moms & moms-to-be!
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Medical Disclaimer:
This podcast is intended as a safe space for women to share their birth experiences. It is not intended to provide medical advice. Each woman’s medical course of action is individual and may not appropriately transfer to another similar situation. Please speak to your medical provider before making any medical decisions. Additionally, it is important to keep in mind that evidence based practice evolves as our knowledge of science improves. To the best of my ability I will attempt to present the most current ACOG and AWHONN recommendations at the time the podcast is recorded, but that may not necessarily reflect the best practices at the time the podcast is heard. Additionally, guests sharing their stories have the right to autonomy in their medical decisions, and may share their choice to go against current practice recommendations. I intend to hold space for people to share their decisions. I will attempt to share the current recommendations so that my audience is informed, but it is up to each individual to choose what is best for them.
Chapters
00:57 - Meeting Dr. Elliot Berlin
02:13 - One Way or a Mother Podcast
07:10 - Birth Plans as Flow Charts
13:00 - Hospital Birth: Rights and Expectations
23:07 - Media Portrayals vs. Birth Reality
33:54 - Breech Babies: A Disappearing Art
49:04 - Creating Space for Baby's Movement
59:12 - Informed Pregnancy Resources
Transcript
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Hello, today I have with me Dr Elliot Berlin.
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Dr Berlin is a prenatal-focused chiropractor, childbirth educator and wellness advocate based in Los Angeles.
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As the founder of Informed Pregnancy Media, he is dedicated to empowering expectant families with evidence-based information and engaging content.
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Dr Berlin hosts the widely popular Informed Pregnancy Podcast, where he explores candid conversations with experts, birth professionals and parents about pregnancy, birth and postpartum experiences.
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His work extends to Informed Pregnancy Plus, a streaming platform featuring pregnancy, birth and parenting-related documentaries, platform featuring pregnancy, birth and parenting-related documentaries, mind-body programs and educational workshops.
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Now he is launching One Way or a Mother, a groundbreaking podcast that delves into complex birth stories from multiple angles, unfolding over an arc of 10 episodes per season.
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Through his chiropractic practice, media platforms and educational initiatives, dr Berlin combines clinical expertise with a passion for storytelling, helping families make informed choices through their journey to parenthood.
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Dr Berlin, welcome and thank you so much for joining me.
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Oh my goodness, Kelly, thank you so much for having me.
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I'm really excited to hear about your new initiative.
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This sounds fascinating to me the One Way, or a Mother podcast, where we're following moms through pregnancy, which we just were chatting a bit before I hit record and I was saying, yes, I do often take the full two hours talking to moms about their pregnancy and birth stories because, really honestly, it would take 10 episodes to really fully encapsulate what happens when one becomes a mother right or for the second time or the third time or whatever.
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It's all so unique and so involved in such a huge learning and growth experience.
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However, the topic of choice today is informed choice in childbirth, which goes together because one way or another talks about mom's journeys and the choices that they have to make.
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So I can't wait to hear about this over the years with executives at TV networks and trying to get birth content on more mainstream media, or what used to be mainstream media.
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What is that?
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Even there's been a turn and it's interesting.
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I generally am sitting around the table with a bunch of people who either don't have kids or totally don't get it.
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They're always looking to how can we infuse drama in these birth stories and I'm like are you nuts?
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The most natural drama and drama doesn't always mean bad.
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Like beautiful things happen.
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You don't have to like everyone is like a snowflake with its own built in you know, act one, act two, climax and conclusion, and they just didn't get it.
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So we decided to do our own media instead.
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But our podcast one way or a mother Mother that is launching now really stems from the Informed Pregnancy podcast, where we have all sorts of different types of episodes, but the most popular are the birth stories.
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And especially, we do these before and after birth stories.
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So I'll interview somebody before they have their baby about pregnancy and also about their plans for birth.
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What are their intentions, how do they picture it going and how they plan to get there.
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And then, after they have the baby, and how did it actually go down?
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And once in a while it goes down just as they envisioned it, and oftentimes it goes down quite differently, sometimes much better than they expected and cooler than they could ever imagine, and sometimes the opposite.
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Either way, the feedback that we've gotten is exactly what you were saying, kelly, which is that I'll have a 40-hour birth story told in 40 minutes and that gives you one minute per hour to recap what happened there.
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And some of the birth stories are really intricate and interesting and people want more.
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The feedback was take us deeper into these stories, bring us in, give us more details, don't leave us with just a cursory cliff notes version of the birth.
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And so we decided to try something different and it's kind of modeled after the serial podcast, where they told one story and they really went deep, interviewing everybody and telling the story from more of a 360 view and giving a fuller picture.
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And so in our first season we interview a mom, ariana, who I think has unfortunately a fairly common story, which is that she was planning for a home birth and ended up with a cesarean that she hadn't planned for at all, definitely didn't want and isn't sure she needed, and it rocked her in a lot of different ways.
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Certainly physically it rocked her.
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Some people have a great cesarean experience.
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She did not and I think emotionally and spiritually it rocked her because she had such a different vision and plan and lifestyle.
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And we catch up with her in her second pregnancy and she's trying to process everything that happened last time and plan for a better experience this time.
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And so we interview her and we interview her husband, zach, and we interview her doctor and her midwife and her doula and her Reiki healer and her mom.
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She's processing ancestral things and it's really quite interesting and fascinating this sort of metamorphosis that she goes through leading up to her second birth, which no spoiler alerts here, but it's a serialized birth story told over an arc of 10 episodes.
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I was going to call it baby serial, since we modeled it after the serial podcast, but I don't want to get sued so we called it One Way or a Mother.
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I love it.
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Like I said, two hours for a birth story is still not enough, but it feels like a lot, and I have interviewed a couple people before and after, which I think is fascinating as well.
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So I love that you're diving so far into it and that you're interviewing the other family members.
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It's just there's so much that plays into it, which is really kind of part of my passion as well, because, as a labor nurse, I noticed moms coming in with, like you said, these expectations and thoughts of how things are going to go down and without the ability to really process the pivot Right, because the culture that we have right now is this download your birth plan, check off the list and hand it over as if it were an order that you're putting in right, but we have to react to the situation and we have a baby that is also making choices.
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So then, how do you make those informed choices within the context of what is happening in your birth?
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You would make an informed choice driving down the road without traffic.
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You would make the informed choice driving down the road without traffic.
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You would make the informed choice of the speed you're going, the direction you're going to go, which path you're going to take to your destination, but if you have a bunch of traffic and there's an accident on the way, and now, suddenly, the exit you're planning on taking is blocked, you're going to have to make a different choice, and that happens in birth as well.
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And so then being able to roll with it is the challenge, because everybody has a vision for what they want with their birth experience, and there's a lot of people focused on what they don't want from their birth experience, and that means they don't want this particular intervention.
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But what if that's the only exit that you can take to get to your destination?
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So then, how do we manage with all that?
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You said so many incredible things in that just one little segment.
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First of all, I think it's really interesting to hear from the RN's perspective, the labor and delivery nurse's perspective, because especially like an open-minded, very supportive RN who still is shackled in certain ways in terms of what you're able to do I want to speak to that for a second.
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And then also the birth plan or the birth intentions.
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They sort of go together.
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So the hospital right down the block from me that I can see out my window here delivers 9,000 babies a month.
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A year, sorry, a year, oh I was going to say dang Still a lot of amniotic fluid Still a lot but it's 9,000 babies a year.
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So 9,000 babies a year, so it's a lot of babies every day, and over the past few years they've really tried hard, I think, to become more open-minded, to be more accommodating and receptive to different birth plans and the different ways women want to give birth at their hospital, the birth community, including doulas and childbirth educators, and they invited us for these gatherings to interface with the hospital and try to have a teamwork approach.
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One of the speakers was a doula who was the liaison for the hospital and she said something that I think is very important to understand.
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She said just know that if you are buying a hospital ticket, you are going on a hospital ride, and that's important because part of your choices in childbirth are you have choices on where you want to give birth.
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You can give birth at a hospital, and there's several different hospitals to choose from.
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You could do birthing center, depending where you live.
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Right, you could do birthing center, and sometimes there are many birthing centers to choose from.
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You could do birthing center, depending where you live.
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Right, you could do birthing center, and sometimes there are many birthing centers to choose from.
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You could do it at home.
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You could do it in the back of a U-Haul if you want to.
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But if you do it in a hospital, you're going to someone else's facility who has a certain way of doing things, comfort zone on how they do things and legal protections on certain ways that they do things.
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And if you're making that choice, you sort of have to work within the confines of that choice that you made, and so I think it's really important.
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Your most important birth choice is probably picking an environment where you want to give birth and the providers, who you want to surround you, if any, and be realistic about what comes with that and the choices that you make within that system, within the ticket that you bought.
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Then you have a range of choices that you can make in there and this hospital is trying really hard to support you within that range.
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But it's somewhat unfair, I think, to go in and say we're going to do this my way even though this causes more liability for you, or this is something you're not trained on and not comfortable with.
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I see it from both sides and I think that's one of the more important choices you can make is being realistic about where you choose to do things and who you choose to support you.
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In terms of the birth plan, I really like your analogy on and downloading a birth plan and just checking off all the things I don't want is probably not going to empower you very much when you get there.
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Just all the years of do the work that I've done doesn't tend to suit you well.
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I look at the birth plan like it's a flow chart.
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And just like you were saying, if I was going to drive from Los Angeles to San Francisco.
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There's a million different ways I can get from point A to point B and if I just leave it to my GPS it'll take me on a certain path.
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But if I explore the maps I might make choices.
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I might say I'd like to take the most scenic route, even if it's a little bit longer, or maybe I just want to take the fastest route, even if it's boring.
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I always like to try to pass by a Krispy Kreme donut shop, but that's just me and with the birth plan.
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So if I look at the map, just like you were saying, I want to take the most scenic route, but all of a sudden the highway's closed, the freeway's closed.
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There's other ways for me to get from point A to point B and they're not necessarily bad, they just weren't my first choice.
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And especially when it comes to something like childbirth, where there's health involved health of the mom, health of the baby and other factors, sometimes those roadblocks come up and it's smart to not crash through the roadblock but to find a detour that will also get you to point B.
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And what I like for the birth plan is to pre-think those things.
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If X happens, what will I want to do and make that your intention.
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So page one is the ideal path you want to take.
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If all things being equal, I would love to take this route from Los Angeles to San Francisco, and that's probably the most natural birth option.
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You could envision yourself wanting to experiment and to experience, um, and so for some people that'll be just a.
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I want to have a cesarean birth.
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And that's your page one, and your last page also, because unless you get pumped yeah, yeah, or that sometimes happens too like I want to have it, but you know, if I go into labor and baby's coming too quick or there's no room available, then I'll have this vaginal birth Exactly no-transcript placenta previa or something like that and you're off of page one without having even started.
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Or sometimes labor starts beautifully and something comes up and you need to move to page two or three, and the last page is always going to be that cesarean birth, because if you need it then you want it, even though it's not your primary choice, and because I think all of those interventions, all the medical interventions, all the drugs, all the procedures, all the surgeries, I think are a gift to us of wonders of modern medicine that we could in two minutes, get your baby out safely, surgically and sew everything back up.
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I think that they're incredibly helpful when they're used on the sparing side, but when we overuse them, I think they very quickly become more harmful than helpful, when they're pushed on people who don't want them and don't need them, and so, because there's a lot of that going on for various reasons, there's a big push back against them, they're vilified, they're looked at as evil and everything is.
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I don't want this, I don't want that, don't make me do this.
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And there again you have to pick providers, if you have the luxury to do so.
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Pick providers who you trust and who are in line with your goals and desires and wishes and supportive of them, and then, if that provider is recommending we need to do a cesarean birth right now.
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You're not questioning them.
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Are you just pushing this on me because you're part of that big evil medical establishment?
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That's a dangerous thing to do, to not have that trust, and so I think these things are very tied together.
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Number one the environment, where you choose, and the providers you choose and the facilities that you choose are going to come with certain guidelines and abilities.
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You're going on a particular ride and try to work within those options that are actually available to you instead of fighting the system the whole way.
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Part two is make a birth plan where you pick your primary goals but ultimately, once the journey starts, you're not driving a precision German automobile, you're in a hot air balloon and the wind could gust one way or the other and again you could change your altitude and you'll still get to the destination spot.
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But to be flexible and to think things out ahead of time and if you do, if you have providers you trust and who are in line with your goals and you're not going to question when it's go time to make decisions, and with that in mind, I think that if you wanted to have, let's say, an unmedicated birth at the hospital and you ended up having induction because X, y or Z happened and you needed it, and the induction maybe progressed to a certain point, but then the baby wasn't responding well and you ended up having a cesarean birth.
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All of that was part of your birth plan and therefore you don't come out feeling like I failed.
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If your birth plan is only page one, then you very oftentimes feel like I didn't have the birth I wanted and I failed.
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But I think, if you think it through and really plan for all the different pathways this birth could take, and make choices ahead of time, when it's not in the heat of the moment.
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Even at the end, even if it didn't go exactly how you wanted to, you still were within your birth plan and I think that's an empowering thing.
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I think so too, and that's why I'm not a big fan of the downloading the birth plan and checking things off, because that, I think, is a lot of what the culture right now feels like is actually informed, and it doesn't feel informed to me.
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So I feel like I'm doing a lot of last minute, trying to inform patients about their choices or helping them reconcile their situation and grieve the birth that they wanted, when I feel like what you said if we could get the flow chart of your birth ironed out ahead of time, then we wouldn't be grieving during the birthing process, we would have already processed all of that and then we can just focus on having the best day of your life.
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However, it looks right, because the day that you get your baby in your arms, no matter how that looks, that's supposed to be the happiest day of your life, and if it's marred with all of this negativity and grief and processing huge emotions especially when you've already got all these huge emotions coming anyway and all these hormones that are like surging, it's just really it's a big challenge.
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So, yeah, I think it's so important to have informed choice and I mean informed.
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You know, like you've really thought through all the scenarios, which is challenging because sometimes those are scary to look at and we don't have to go down every single pathway, but you have to be able to know if the doctor whom I trust, like you said, recommends this, the right questions to ask to make sure that aligns with my values.
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Even though I trust this doctor, I want to feel comfortable with this situation and the choices that I have.
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Asking the right questions and making sure that your voice is heard is equally important.
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I mean our healthcare system.
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It's hard to advocate for yourself anyway, like whether it's birth, whether it's the emergency room, whether you've been diagnosed with cancer, it's hard to advocate for yourself, but I don't know why.
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I just feel like it's harder in obstetrics.
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Yeah, you're absolutely right, and I don't know why either.
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But what I could tell you is I just recently had two different recently, meaning one just a month or two ago and one about a year ago.
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Recently, meaning one just a month or two ago and one about a year ago two different physicians who had babies, who had a hard time advocating for themselves, and for one of them it led to her having to terminate her pregnancy because she had hyperemesis and the system she was in just was not listening to her, taking care of her, giving her what she needed to support her, and it was really profound.
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As I was talking to her, I'm like you are a medical doctor in the medical system unable to advocate for yourself.
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And she was on board.
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That's absolutely true.
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The system didn't really make her feel like she had space to advocate for herself.
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I'm like, if you can't, how do the rest of us advocate for ourselves?
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I was just a plain person who doesn't have all the medical background and knowledge and walk in there with credentials.
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How do we advocate?
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How do they advocate for themselves?
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And it's a profound point that you make.
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It's not.
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I think it's set up that way in the medical model in general, but even in obstetrics.
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If you look at the lab coat that the doctor wears very dignified and prestigious and the flimsy little oversized unisex hospital muumuu that is very susceptible to the wind blowing this way or that way and being totally exposed, who is the dominant one and who's observing it there?
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It's set up to make us believe.
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So.
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I do believe.
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If you buy a hospital ticket, you're going on a hospital ride, but at the same token I have rights, and in America there's freedoms that give me certain rights.
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And the feeling that is given, I think, when you walk into a hospital in general, is that I check my rights at the door and I now work for you, so to speak.
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But in reality it's the opposite.
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You, a, don't have to check your rights at the door and, B, everyone at that hospital works for me.
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I'm the patient, I'm the customer.
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From a medical perspective, a law perspective and even a business perspective, it's the other way around, but the environment doesn't make it feel that way.
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That's tricky to navigate.
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I also would point out one other thing, which is that, as much as we've learned scientifically and medically and advanced over the past 100 years, 200 years which we have, incredibly we still know a tiny fraction of what there is to know.
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We are born innately knowing all of it and today medicine can't tell you how to take a sperm and an egg and incubate a baby into a human, but a woman's body can do that and her body also is similarly programmed to deliver the finished product in a very efficient way For various reasons.
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There's this kind of dual, double-edged sword where information is great and information is terrible at the same time.
00:20:44.061 --> 00:21:05.346
The more information I have in that neocortex, that new part of my brain that other animals don't have, that can think and process and rationalize and worry, the less I'm reliant on the limbic system, the older, animalistic part of my brain that has all of the hardwired information, much more data than we know medically today with all the advancements.
00:21:05.346 --> 00:21:12.635
For example, if I was listening to the nutritionist inside me, I would probably be a whole lot healthier than I am.
00:21:12.635 --> 00:21:19.303
It would tell me exactly what I need to eat, when I need to eat, when I've had enough, too much, and I would love to listen to that nutritionist inside me.
00:21:19.303 --> 00:21:35.185
But just on the way to work from my home to the office, which is only a 15-minute drive, I pass no fewer than five giant billboards that have things like a huge stack of fluffy pancakes with butter and syrup dripping down the side.
00:21:35.185 --> 00:21:43.307
That totally drown out that nutritional voice inside me that's saying go have some whole wheat grain or something like that.
00:21:43.307 --> 00:21:45.296
I think it's true with everything.
00:21:45.296 --> 00:21:49.748
The more we could listen to that voice inside, the better things would go for us.
00:21:50.148 --> 00:21:55.409
There's a lot of noise around, it is one thing, and so we're not so in touch with that inner voice.
00:21:55.409 --> 00:21:58.804
We don't trust it and we don't have a great relationship with it.
00:21:58.804 --> 00:22:05.295
So when it comes time to labor, which is so unknown, it's hard to trust that voice instead of all the voices around you.
00:22:05.295 --> 00:22:16.559
And part B is because we are in a modern medical system and that intelligence is not familiar with that system and can't really help you make choices within that system, and so it's a double-edged sword.
00:22:16.559 --> 00:22:20.207
We need to have information because that information doesn't exist.
00:22:20.207 --> 00:22:24.595
We need to have information because most of us are not in touch with that inner voice.
00:22:24.595 --> 00:22:35.885
But I think one of the best things we could do to help people have empowered experiences is help them connect to that inner voice and help them understand the options that exist in the modern medical system.
00:22:35.885 --> 00:22:40.714
And I guess one other thing is this is more of a modern thing as well.
00:22:41.096 --> 00:22:56.861
It was not that long ago that we grew up in villages and lived on family properties and saw regularly and participated in regularly family members having babies, pregnancy, childbirth Everyone would pitch in.
00:22:56.861 --> 00:23:03.048
Breastfeeding was not so foreign, you would just see it, it would be part of your upbringing, it wasn't foreign.
00:23:03.048 --> 00:23:09.550
I think most people don't live with their families on the family property anymore and so we don't have that kind of support that we used to have.
00:23:09.550 --> 00:23:11.002
We don't give it, we don't receive it.
00:23:11.002 --> 00:23:20.346
And then also we don't have that kind of exposure to what natural, normal, healthy pregnancy, birth and postpartum look like.
00:23:21.067 --> 00:23:31.835
And so the vision we do have oftentimes come from people who have their stories, and the ones who love to tell their stories are usually the most dramatic and maybe even over-dramatize what actually happened.
00:23:32.640 --> 00:23:36.592
And the other source is television movies and newspaper headlines.
00:23:36.592 --> 00:23:50.507
And let's say, for example, I'm 30 years old, I've never flown on an airplane and I'm going to go for my first flight, but all I know about airplanes is what I see in TV movies and newspaper headlines.
00:23:50.507 --> 00:23:52.190
I'd be terrified to fly.
00:23:52.190 --> 00:24:06.852
You'd probably have to knock me out like Mr T from the A-Team, because the only images I have of air travel are like mechanical failure and the plane falls out of the sky or it's hijacked by terrorists or there are snakes on it.
00:24:06.852 --> 00:24:42.753
The idea that a plane can just take off and have a smooth flight with yummy snacks and land safely is foreign to me, and I think that's what we do with childbirth, and people just have this wildly dramatized view of childbirth as something horrible and terrible that you just have to survive through, whereas I think it as a nurse and someone who is involved in in childbirth, you see the whole range of what childbirth could be, and sometimes it looks like the most incredible thing where people are sad when it's over.
00:24:43.680 --> 00:24:45.528
Yeah, Sometimes it's super calm.
00:24:45.528 --> 00:24:47.355
I was interviewing a doula the other day.
00:24:47.355 --> 00:24:52.328
She talks about boring birth, which is like kind of the goal right.
00:24:52.328 --> 00:24:57.867
And because of boring birth, like you can focus on the exciting part, which is meeting your baby right.
00:24:57.867 --> 00:24:59.451
The other parts don't have to be eventful.
00:24:59.451 --> 00:25:03.390
And I think it's funny because I wasn't a labor and delivery nurse.
00:25:03.390 --> 00:25:05.201
When I had my first, I was with my second.
00:25:05.321 --> 00:25:24.707
The expectation for me was like a dramatic, like the way that you behave to cope with the pain is to act like the movie Knocked Up or Friends, where everybody's like screaming, and I never knew that there was other ways to cope with the pain that didn't involve this screaming like a banshee, which I just think is so interesting.
00:25:24.707 --> 00:25:31.231
And now that's one of the first things that I try to share with moms when they're going through this process is that there's just other ways to cope.
00:25:31.231 --> 00:25:34.673
We don't have to act the way that we see society acting.
00:25:34.673 --> 00:25:44.394
That's not what we did when we were living in the villages or in the family farm, when there was actual support and there was actual demonstrations of what the body normally does.
00:25:44.394 --> 00:25:55.722
The other day I had a mom that was natural doing great screaming, hurting my ears and I was like friend, let's talk about this, let's hack your nervous system a little bit, because do you know why gorillas beat their chest?
00:25:55.742 --> 00:25:58.951
Do you know why gorillas beat their chest?
00:25:58.951 --> 00:26:11.076
That's because it stimulates the vagus nerve to calm your body, to go into the parasympathetic nervous system so that you can actually like flow with what's going on.
00:26:11.076 --> 00:26:22.704
I was like all you have to do to hack your nervous system is take that high pitched scream, bring it down into your chest and let it vibrate through your chest with a low roar, like you're just powerful.
00:26:22.704 --> 00:26:25.191
And she started growling and doing that.
00:26:25.191 --> 00:26:26.500
Oh my God, that is so much better.
00:26:27.001 --> 00:26:32.433
Yeah, there's a huge, huge difference between adrenaline noise and oxytocin noise.
00:26:33.480 --> 00:26:34.762
Yeah, and it's just.
00:26:34.762 --> 00:26:38.673
It's sad that we don't have actual models for that now.
00:26:39.099 --> 00:26:47.972
Well, yeah, so one of the things that we've done at Informed Pregnancy because of this exactly and the media is so tainting is I made two documentaries.
00:26:47.972 --> 00:26:49.162
I produced two films.
00:26:49.162 --> 00:26:52.909
One is called Trial of Labor, which is about VBAC.
00:26:52.909 --> 00:26:58.788
The subtitle would be how to have your second birth experience the first time around.
00:26:58.969 --> 00:26:59.189
Yeah.
00:26:59.369 --> 00:27:01.073
And learning from other people's stories.
00:27:01.073 --> 00:27:09.049
And the other one is called Heads Up, the Disappearing Art of Vaginal Breach Delivery, and there's some really beautiful births.
00:27:09.049 --> 00:27:12.087
Heads Up has a beautiful breech birth, to see them.
00:27:12.087 --> 00:27:14.848
When people see it, they're like, oh, why did we stop doing that?
00:27:15.028 --> 00:27:18.319
Right you know it's a beautiful option and we go into the whole story.
00:27:18.319 --> 00:27:23.702
You know it's a beautiful option and we go into the whole story, the whole study that sparked the disappearing option for Bridge Birth.
00:27:23.702 --> 00:27:51.615
But when my two films came out, they did really well at first in terms of the mission, which is empowerment and informing people of choices and options, and then over time the screenings died down and people wanted to talk about it and interview it and I asked other filmmakers, like Ricky Lake from the Business of being Born, like how do you keep your film alive and still fulfilling its mission after that initial flare of the match dies down?
00:27:51.615 --> 00:28:02.541
I talked to several filmmakers and they all had the same answer, which is it's hard, people don't find it anymore and people stop talking about it and it's not on their radar.
00:28:02.541 --> 00:28:03.663
And then I was getting from trial of labor.
00:28:03.663 --> 00:28:10.949
This is what really hurt People saying gosh, I wish I had seen that before I had my baby and I'm like no, I made platform for video.
00:28:11.028 --> 00:28:37.229
There's about 30 documentaries on there and it does give you insights into birth the way it could be Movies like Orgasmic Birth, these Are my Hours, which is just a great film of a person giving birth in an undisturbed setting, narrating what she was feeling like when she went through it.
00:28:37.229 --> 00:28:42.652
And there's other films, like Beautiful Births, that are less known films.
00:28:42.652 --> 00:28:54.132
The Mama Sherpas is a great one about doulas Midwife, the film and, yeah, we have about 30 documentaries on there, and so I wanted to aggregate it in a way that anybody can watch it from any place.
00:28:54.132 --> 00:28:56.605
We have apps for Apple, android, roku.
00:28:56.605 --> 00:29:09.949
You can just stream it online, and it's $6 a month with no commitment, and so you really and if you have trouble with the $6, I would encourage you to email me and I'll make it available to you anyway.
00:29:09.949 --> 00:29:13.766
We're not in it to make money, we're in it to make a difference.
00:29:13.967 --> 00:29:14.588
That's amazing.
00:29:14.588 --> 00:29:25.991
I really think having all of that out there is so important, because I think that people just have no clue what they're getting into and they don't know that they have no clue what they're getting into.
00:29:25.991 --> 00:29:26.981
It's so hard.
00:29:26.981 --> 00:29:34.828
I feel the same challenge that you feel with having the birth that you want with your second birth versus what you wanted with because I had to have a do it.
00:29:34.828 --> 00:29:47.167
We call it the do over at the hospital that I work at, and it's actually why I started working at the hospital that I work at, because the nurse that interviewed me there asked me why I was wanting to be a labor and delivery nurse and I was like because I'm processing my first birth.
00:29:47.167 --> 00:29:52.289
And she was like, oh sweetie, we'll have your do-over here, you don't worry, I'll be your nurse.
00:29:52.289 --> 00:29:53.112
And she was.
00:29:53.112 --> 00:29:57.288
She was the nurse for my do-over and she is so cute.
00:29:57.288 --> 00:29:58.712
She still says about my son.
00:30:02.641 --> 00:30:03.363
I'm the one that saw him first.
00:30:03.363 --> 00:30:06.491
You don't know, I'm thinking of a show for Informed Pregnancy Plus called the Do-Over.
00:30:07.119 --> 00:30:10.769
Oh yeah, you should Absolutely, and I mean it's a thing it really is.
00:30:10.769 --> 00:30:17.451
It's sad because that's how I processed my first birth was having my do-over, and it doesn't have to be like that.
00:30:17.451 --> 00:30:26.278
And that's like I said why I got coaching certification so that I could try to reach out to moms beforehand, because it's great to have a doula and an advocate and a chiropractor and all those things.
00:30:26.278 --> 00:30:27.601
But what happens if you don't know?
00:30:27.601 --> 00:30:28.986
You need those things, Right.
00:30:29.227 --> 00:30:32.238
That's what you said before is also a great point.
00:30:32.238 --> 00:30:33.641
You don't know what you don't know.
00:30:33.641 --> 00:30:38.366
So at least if you know what you don't know, then you can try to figure out that information.
00:30:38.366 --> 00:30:42.232
But if you don't even know that you don't know it, then you're just stuck not knowing.
00:30:42.613 --> 00:30:58.326
Yeah, that could be a whole other journey, when you end up not knowing what you don't know and then you have to come out and deal with it, which I do get a lot of second time moms that are like hey, so how do we fix this first birth and then we go through that whole scenario.
00:30:58.547 --> 00:31:27.942
You know and heads up, there's a mom who tells her story and she had a breech baby and she labored so fast she went to the hospital the butt was pretty much coming out and the doctors just had never seen a breech birth before and they panicked and in their panic they first of all kicked out her husband and second of all knocked her out completely, completely and op report says they pushed the baby back in essentially and did a c-section and she has no memory of her birth at all because they knocked her out.
00:31:27.942 --> 00:31:30.673
She was probably two minutes away from just holding her baby.
00:31:30.673 --> 00:31:52.548
Naturally her husband has no memory because he was kicked out and it really again, it traumatized her in a lot of different ways and and then she does talk about, like when she had her V-back, her C-section scar when she saw it in the mirror for her always appeared to her like a frowning face and then when she had her V-back it turned the frown around for her.
00:31:52.990 --> 00:31:53.711
That's beautiful.
00:31:54.421 --> 00:31:56.949
That do-over concept was very powerful for her.
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