Culture is Dynamic, Birth is Universal

The room changes just before a baby arrives.

It is subtle at first. A shift in energy. A quieting that feels almost orchestrated. Not silent, but reverent. As if everyone, consciously or not, understands that something ancient is about to happen.

I have seen this in hospital rooms in Colorado mountain towns, in overcrowded clinics in Tanzania, in vertical birth rooms in hospitals in Northern Ecuador. Different languages. Different protocols. Different levels of intervention. And yet, the moment right before a baby enters the world feels the same.

A threshold.

I have yet to find a greater high than witnessing a powerful birth.

There is nothing like it. The way time bends. The way a woman disappears into herself and then returns as something entirely new. The way a partner hovers at the edge of awe, often unsure what to do with the magnitude of what they are witnessing. If the dad cries, I’m done for.

And then, the sound.

A first breath. A cry. Lungs expanding for the first time as a body learns how to exist in air instead of water. It is abrupt and miraculous and completely ordinary all at once.

Birth and death are the two most universal experiences we share. Every single one of us has passed through the body of another to arrive here. And every single one of us will, without exception, leave.

This brings me comfort.

A reminder that our time here, on this spinning rock in the vastness of space, is fleeting. That we are here for a blink. And yet, within that blink, we feel everything. We love, we grieve, we build entire systems to try and make sense of it all.

And nowhere is that more apparent than in the way we approach birth.

Because while birth itself is universal, the way we experience it is not.

Culture is dynamic. Birth is universal.

A theme that will weave itself through these pages is plurality. The understanding that many things can be true at the same time. That birth can be both mundane and miraculous. That it can be empowering and traumatic. That a mother can feel overwhelming joy and deep fear in the same breath.

That we can be both held and harmed by the very systems meant to care for us.

I have spent the better part of my adult life working as a doula, supporting births and learning from birthworkers around the world. What started as curiosity quickly became something else entirely. A calling, maybe. Or an unraveling.

Because once you begin to see birth clearly, you cannot unsee it.

You begin to notice the patterns. The ways in which control has replaced trust. The ways in which knowledge has been stripped from communities and centralized into systems that do not always serve them. The ways in which something deeply human has been reshaped into something procedural.

And yet, despite all of this, birth persists.

Women still open. Bodies still know. Babies still find their way here.

I have stood in rooms where birth felt like ceremony. Where mothers were surrounded by song and prayer and hands that knew exactly how to support them. Where babies were welcomed not just by their parents, but by an entire community.

I have also stood in rooms where birth felt like something else entirely.

Where voices were ignored. Where bodies were commanded. Where urgency replaced patience, and fear replaced trust. Where a woman labored not only through contractions, but through a system that did not know how to see her.

In those moments, it becomes painfully clear that birth is not just about bringing life into the world.

It is about power.

It is about who holds it, who has lost it, and who is reclaiming it.

And it is about what happens to a society when something as fundamental as birth is shaped by systems that were never designed to honor it.

There is one thing I take very seriously, despite the inherent absurdity of being alive.

It is our responsibility to practice joy.

To allow ourselves moments of unimpeded awe and gratitude, even in a world that so often feels heavy with suffering. Because joy, like birth, is not frivolous. It is foundational. It is what reminds us why any of this matters in the first place.

I have felt that kind of joy most profoundly in birth rooms.

And I have felt its opposite there too.

Grief. Rage. Helplessness. The kind of witnessing that changes you.

[trigger warning - infant loss ahead]

There was a day in Tanzania back on the first Wombs of the World trip ever, when we lost four babies.

Four small bodies, wrapped in kanga and laid side by side on a table in the corner of the nurse's station. A silence that felt too heavy for the room that held it.

And then there was a fifth.

A baby who did not breathe for over thirty minutes. A mother whose hand I held as we waited in that unbearable space between hope and knowing. Doctors working frantically and terrified. A body that would not respond. The rain outside was so loud, mimicing the tears I was holding back. This was not the time or place for me to show my own emotions.

And then, impossibly, life.

A breath. A return. A baby at her breast the next morning, wide-eyed and alive.

Joy and sorrow, existing in the same space. The same breath. The same body.

This is birth.

This is what it means to stand at the threshold between life and death and bear witness to both.

And this is why birth matters.

Because how we meet people in these moments, how we care for them, how we honor or disregard their humanity, does not stay contained within the walls of a hospital or a home.

It ripples outward.

Into families. Into communities. Into the very fabric of our societies.

If we want to understand the world we are living in, we have to look at how we enter it.

And if we want to create something different, something more just, more humane, more connected, then we have to be willing to reimagine birth.

Not as a medical event alone, but as a cultural one. A relational one. A deeply human one.

So I invite you, as you move through these pages, to do just that.

To imagine. To question. To remember.

Because everything we have built can be rebuilt.

And birth, in all its universality, might just be the place to begin.

Learn about our Full Spectrum Doula Training and begin your journey as a birthworker.