My Role as Your Doula and Circumcision

Written By Tamara Niedermann

My work as a doula is multifaceted. I provide: 

Emotional support.
Physical support.
Education.
Activism.
Empowerment. 

My greatest desire is to be a helpful, and trusted addition to your birthing team. A large part of my role as your doula is to respect your body’s innate intelligence and help you advocate for compassionate, individualized, evidence based care. I believe mothers should be educated on their birthing options and then supported in their birthing choices. Nothing brings me more joy than when a mother knows without any doubt that she made all the right choices for her body, her pregnancy, and for her birth. 

As your doula when we sit down to discuss your birthing options, like an epidural or pitocin, we discuss the risks and benefits for those interventions and then I step aside and give you space and respect to make the choice that is right for you. However, when it comes to routine infant circumcision, I would argue, and so would many others, that it's not the parents decision to make. Just as I believe pregnant women are autonomous and their choices for their bodies should be supported, I believe that your baby's body will be born exactly as it should be and that his bodily autonomy should be respected.

I believe that routine infant circumcision is a human rights issue. Recently in Michigan doctors were charged in the first federal genital mutilation case in the United States. Americans were shocked to hear that they had mutilated over one hundred girls. However, many of the arguments cultures use in favor of female genital cutting have been used or are currently used in the United States for routine infant circumcision. 

It's assumed that it's cleaner or that it helps prevent disease. Even worse, historically, circumcision has been used to prevent adolescents from perceived immorality. We know all of these things are myths and propaganda when it comes to the mutilation of the clitoris, but for whatever reason we struggle with seeing the correlation to routine infant circumcision. 

For the first time since I started my doula career, on December 29, 2017, I took a public stance on circumcision. On facebook I gently shared, "In our training we are taught that we should remain unbiased and only give information so that parents can make the right choices for themselves. But I wrestle with the question, 'who is making the right choice for baby?' My heart as your doula is for you to be educated in your options, and then supported in your choices so that you can have the best birth experience possible. My heart as a human being, is that we would respect children's bodies and keep their genitals intact."

I woke up the day after I shared those words to a facebook ban. I was unable to post or even log in to my personal or business facebook accounts. My heart was broken. I was sure that people would hear my heart, and know that my desire was never to abuse or hurt people who have circumcised their child. I reached out to a friend who encouraged me and said, "It can be really hard for people to see stuff like this because they don't want to recognize how they have harmed their sons, how their partners have been harmed, or how they themselves have been harmed." And she's not wrong. 

I don't want to hurt any of my past clients or people that I know and love, and I don't want to jeopardize my business, but I cannot ethically doula for families who plan on circumcising their child. If you are planning to circumcise your child, please take the next half an hour and watch this video. There are some difficult moments in this video, but Ryan McAllister, PhD, uses scientific evidence to address what he calls the "elephant in the hospital" in a way that is easy to understand.

 
 
Tamara Niedermann

hi! i'm tamara, creator and owner of the kindred feminine. i have always known i am at my best when i was in support of the people around me. i surrounded myself with deep connections -- people who i could know and live life with. that desire for deep relationship is what has guided my journey to birth work, herbalism, and supporting the birthing and bleeding people in my community.

six years ago, when my younger sister and her husband started their parenting journey, she started sharing the things she was learning about pregnancy and labor. i watched documentaries with her. i read the books she recommended, and i realized that there was another way to birth your babies. until that point, the idea of home birth and midwives and doulas were sort of a joke. in movies and television they portray midwives as the hippy lady with incense and beads -- which to be fair that midwife exists and now i strive to be worthy of her -- but she's played as a joke. it took these books and documentaries, and new perspectives to show me that midwifery and doulas are legitimate callings, and home birth is a legitimate option.

simultaneous to my birth worker journey, i was coming into a better understanding of my womanhood and i wanted to have more holistic options for interacting with my fertility. so, i transitioned from hormonal birth control to the sympto-thermal method of fertility awareness to track my cycles, and then i switched out my single use menstrual products for reusables. both of these changes gave me a deeper knowledge of my cycles and my body

my growing love for fertility and body literacy combined with my heart for birthing and bleeding people and pregnancy, started me on this incredible journey of learning, and growth, and stewardship of the wisdom that has been passed to me.

the kindred feminine serves all birthing and bleeding people by supporting pregnant people prenatally, attending out of hospital births, and in the postpartum time. tamara teaches bodily autonomy through the fertility awareness method. i processes placentas, and makes herbal preparations including teas, baths, salves, and tinctures and elixirs.

i'm a bisexual cis woman who uses the pronouns she, hers, and her. i’m a newlywed in my early thirties. i'm the daughter of an immigrant single mother. i'm an advocate for fat positivity, body hair acceptance, lgbtq families, body literacy, and bodily autonomy for all people. i'm a birth keeper, and an herb

https://thekindredfeminine.com
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