When Alex Barr found out she was pregnant with her first child, she was ecstatic until she went to see her OB/GYN.
"I kind of went into it a little bit blind and literally from my first appointment, my OB/GYN was very like, negative. It was very like, I was almost, I like describe it as like being slapped in the face," she said.
Barr is plus-size, and she told me she felt a lot of fat phobia coming from that particular doctor. Suddenly, it seemed like having a baby wouldn't be such a joyous experience for her.
She eventually switched her care to midwifery with a more holistic approach that she appreciated. But when it came time to give birth, things still didn't go as planned.
"I had an experience with my birth where literally everything went the opposite way that I thought it was going to happen, which does happen, right? And I left at the end of it just really feeling like I could have used some more information, I could have used some more education and I could have used some more support," Barr said.
So she did something to change it for other pregnant people. She became a doula.
"But I saw this gap of like a doula's higher price service, right? So, you know, we spend a lot of time with people. We spend time prenatally, we're there for the whole birth, we see them postpartum. So there's a lot that a doula does. It's a, you know, I just saw this gap of like, I could help more people, maybe, if I was in the education space, which is what I was so passionate about. So in 2021, I became a childbirth educator and I just started building what's now Dare to Birth and it kind of grew into this like, you know, I call it my second baby," Barr said.
"You know, like all the information that I needed when I was pregnant and the support and the non-judgmental support especially."
Dare to Birth offers childbirth classes in a different kind of way and from a different kind of team. They say they are disrupting the negative narrative around birth with their judgment-free, inclusive approach to childbirth classes.
"The big thing that we talk about is advocacy. How do we advocate for what we want? How do we even decide what we want? What information do we need, right? So really just trying to fill the gaps that I was seeing as I was working with families as a doula," Barr said.
She explained more about her experience with her first OB/GYN.
"So the doctor essentially told me like, we don't recommend that you're pregnant like for your size, right? So I mean, we, we recommend people that are your size, do not get pregnant. And it was just kind of that moment of like, well, like too late, right? But then it was also just this list of like, you know, your risk for stillbirth goes up, your risk for preeclampsia, your risk for gestational diabetes and things like that, just like very much like all these scary things and really presented to me in a scary way," Barr said.
"And when I asked, OK, what can I do about those things? And it was like nothing, right? Which, that's not necessarily true. And some of them we don't have control over, but a lot of them, we can get support with gestational diabetes, we can get, you know, extra care for, it can be managed, right? There's some of these things that now, when I look back at it at the moment, it felt very scary," she said.
"But now I look at it like, oh, I could have found support and education for those things, you know, a lot of plus-size people will share similar experiences but it's things like, if they ask you how active you are, they kind of don't believe you or they ask you like, what your diet and your nutrition is like and they don't really believe you. And they're like, oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, you're probably eating too much or doing too much or things like that. And, that's something I've experienced throughout my life, but it was much, very, very intensified when I was pregnant," Barr said.
Barr said Dare to Birth is trying to break the mold on the kind of person who teaches birth education classes and the type of person they're directed toward, as well.
"Yes, we kind of pride ourselves on being the different childbirth education, right," Barr said. "Like obviously, you know, we look a little different, all of our branding, all of our class materials look a little different. So we do kind of try to stand out in that way a little bit, right?"
Dare to Birth also works a lot with the queer community.
"So that's something we were really passionate about was creating a space for queer families, for single parents, which is a really underutilized group, a lot of classes you'll take and some of them will even still say like husband and wife, which I think is funny, right? Families look different. All families look different, right? Single parents and their parent might come and take my class, or queer families or really trying to create this space of like whoever you are, we're here for you and we're going to help, you know, we're not going to talk about your husband if you're not married or you're not with a man, right? So very open and very making sure that the way we speak is very inclusive and very open that like it'll work for whoever's in our class, right? So we're helping these underrepresented groups, but we're also going to be there for a lot of different types of families," Barr said.
Barr shared some of the issues, fears and problems she hears from the community when they come into your class.
"I hear a lot of things like assuming, you know that anybody who's giving birth is a woman, anybody who's giving birth must have a husband or a boyfriend or, right. Very heteronormative kind of language. I hear a lot of just not being educated about how they can get pregnant or there are options to get pregnant if we're talking about queer families, if we're talking about single parents, right? Just like not a lot of resources of, what are you going to do? Who is going to be there to support you and how do we get them educated so that they can support you during your birth or postpartum, right? Postpartum as a single parent, it looks a lot different than if you have a partner. So just really language is a big thing, but also just kind of understanding and offering those creative solutions and just understanding that different families are going to look different, right? And how can we help them get ready for, you know, pregnancy and birth and postpartum," Barr said.
Does Barr think the conversation around birth is shifting right now, and is it shifting enough?
"I definitely think it's shifting, which is really cool to see when I've had experiences of people bringing their parent or their mom to classes and getting to hear the differences of when they give birth. And I'm sure anybody can ask their parents, their grandparents about the experiences and see how much it's changed. I think the fact that we're talking about it more has changed, which is a big thing and social media helps, but a lot of the shame and the not understanding and not knowing your choices just comes from the fact that nobody talks about it," she said.
"And whereas if we look back to the past, maybe by the time I was having my first baby, I would have already seen a couple of people have babies or I would have seen people in my family have babies, right. Our life looks a little different, right. The world looks different, right. We're more separated from our families and less people are having babies, right. And less people are having multiple babies, right. It's not lik,e my grandma was one of eight, right? So she seemed to, you know, you experience it, you hear about it kind of thing. Because we don't have those conversations as openly, it can lead to a lot of that shame and a lot of that, like I didn't know that this was going to happen to me postpartum. I didn't know that my body was going to change or that this weird thing was going to happen when I was pregnant, right, or in labor or in birth the same thing, right? So really having more of a conversation about it and talking more openly about it, I think is such a positive shift. I would like to see that come up even more," she said.
After going through an imperfect first birth experience, Barr shared about what it means to her to get to do this and to get to work with so many different kinds of families and help them be a little bit more prepared.
"It means everything. I really did not know this was going to be my career or like what I dove into. And if you talked to me like 10 years ago, I would have been like, you're crazy, right? So it's something that I did stumble into, but I really found such a passion and such an excitement for helping families. And I'm telling you every time you hear a birth story, every time I get a little picture of like we had our baby, right? Or just a conversation of like, hey, I was thinking about you and my birth and I was thinking about like, remember what Alex said, right?" Barr said.
"So even hearing that is just like overwhelmingly positive and hearing that from the people who want to be educators and teach for date of birth has been even crazier of like, oh, like other people are paying attention, right? It just feels like this growth that is more than I ever imagined. But it's like really such a cool thing that I'm getting to be a part of," she said.
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