Hey! I (Shelbie) am so thrilled to share the Safety Net story with you!
I am originally from a small town outside Kansas City, Missouri. I went to college in an even SMALLER town a few hours south of my hometown and this teeny tiny town is the birth place of my passion for becoming a doula. I learned about the field from a friend at my college who became one after she graduated and it puzzled me why someone would even need a doula. Since then, I did some passive research into it when I had free time.
Just before my husband and I got married in September of 2019, I was diagnosed infertile, which did not come as a shock due to PCOS. We spent time talking about what our family would look like since we couldn’t birth children. We talked about our desire to foster and adopt and that has been the journey we started and have been on since.
BUT!
In April of 2020, one week after the world shut down due to COVID-19, I decided it had been a while since I had taken a pregnancy test. I had one more left, so I stepped away from a facetime with my best friend and took it. Every other test had been negative, so I took it and sat back down on facetime with my friend and waited. You’d laugh if you were a fly on the wall when that test said ‘Pregnant’. I thought I might have been having a heart attack. I was pregnant.
I was induced in December of 2020 due to a complication of my liver called Cholestasis of pregnancy and gave birth via emergency c-section due to the overuse of Pitocin. I had a really hard time coming to terms with the way I brought my daughter into the world. It wasn’t how I wanted it to happen and I knew if I just had someone who was informed about Pitocin and how it should be used, maybe things could have been different. My husband and I decided our daughter would be our only biological child due to the recurrence of cholestasis and the risks involved as well as our continued desire for foster care and adoption. Talk about serious regret and anger! My only chance to have a birth experience and that was it?!
So I went back to what I always did: I figured out how to make sure this never happened to someone else if I could help it.
I used my experiences to fuel my fire. I talked with my inner circle of friends and family and made plans. I sat on them for a year, then I took a leap! I signed up for doula training! I sifted through many different training organizations and settled with DONA International. Their training and organization methods, theories, and standards were just what I wanted. Then I set up my business and got to work. Before I was even trained, I already had two births scheduled. I created Safety Net Doula Services because all people who give birth need someone to catch them in times of need. There will always be something that comes up that the person in labor was not expecting, whether it is an issue medically, physically, or emotionally, and Safety Net is here to make sure those unexpected things are dealt with and the experience is still positive and satisfying.
Safety Net is a place for all people in all walks and stages of life. Whether you are gay, straight, young, old, trans, cis, whatever religion/faith or lack there of you believe in, you have a place at our table!
Safety Net Doula Services 