Seasoned Birth and Postpartum Doula support for families in Los Angeles

Alongside the emotional support I offer is a very hands-on approach to comfort during labor- counter pressure and massage as well as optimal fetal positioning techniques. I love helping birth partners feel empowered to be an effective source of support as well. I view birth as an initiation into the psychologically transformative process of parenthood where our very identities are required to radically shift.

I’ve changed the way that I work this year by teaming up with two aligned and experienced Los Angeles based birth and postpartum doulas to form Birth Alchemy Doula Collective. We offer small group childbirth education workshops, birth plan sessions, on-call labor support and postpartum doula support and ongoing community gatherings in the greater LA area.

We are Dawn Batson, Brana Ninkov, and Rebecca Belenky, and together we are able to offer the kind of prenatal, labor and postpartum support families need. From sifting through information and questions prenatally all the way through to breastfeeding support or infant feeding visits, postpartum support, and infant sleep questions, we are able to hold our families’ needs more fully because we work as a collective. We work with families whose choices vary from home birth to planned cesarean, co-sleeping to sleep training. Our focus is on expanding the ideas of what birth and postpartum experiences may require and on learning to align decision-making with each families unique needs and values.

My Training:

I assisted my first home birth in 2001. I took the DONA birth doula and postpartum doula certification and learned assistant midwifery skills under the renowned midwives Ina May Gaskin and Pamela Hunt at The Farm in Tennessee, and with Orgasmic Birth author Elizabeth Davis in California. I am trained in Childbirth Education through DTI as well as through Hypnobabies, and am also a certified Hypnobabies doula. I completed the Echo Parenting 10-week trauma informed parenting workshop in 2018 and again in 2020. For several years I have benefitted from an apprenticeship with Transformed by Birth author Britta Bushnell in Los Angeles, and have incorporated a lot of her wisdom into my work in childbirth education. The most intense training I’ve undertaken was birthing my own daughter in 2013 and parenting her. I’m still learning every day.