The Cost of Being a Doula
Before creating The Liberated Birth (TLB), I spent years working in birth and postpartum spaces throughout the DMV area. Again and again, I heard the words “community” and “support,” but behind the scenes, many doulas were overworked, underpaid, isolated, and treated more like labor than people.
As a Black Muslim woman, some of the experiences I had in this field were very traumatic.
One New Year’s, a family had already agreed to pay the holiday rate for the white doula they were originally scheduled with. When that doula became ill and they were told I would be their doula instead, everything changed.
Suddenly, the holiday pay they had already agreed to became a problem. They didn’t want to pay me the full rate. The family made it clear they did not want me in their home, only reluctantly agreeing after learning no other doulas were available.
What hurt even more was the response from the agency owner. Instead of taking a stand and making it clear that this behavior was unacceptable, I was pressured to still take the shift in order to keep the client. The owner even offered to personally cover the difference in holiday pay.
Did I go? Absolutely not.
And unfortunately, that was not an isolated experience.
Over the years, I experienced racism, bullying, and silencing in environments where it began to feel less like teamwork and more like ownership. I was expected to walk into homes where families openly held beliefs or political views hostile toward Muslims and Muslim communities around the world, all while quietly suppressing my own discomfort in order to remain “professional.”
Over time, the pressure, burnout, racism, and disconnection nearly destroyed my love for this work.
When people talk about the cost of doula care, they rarely talk about the cost of being a doula.
The miles driven through storms and traffic. The holidays spent away from our own families. The emotional labor. The on-call hours. The missed sleep. The wear on our bodies. The racism some doulas experience. The expectation that we will absorb all of it quietly because this work is a “calling.”
I have come to believe that a profession built on caring for others cannot be sustained by sacrificing the people doing the caring.
Birth work is ancestral for me. It is community work. Care work. Village work. Spirit work. Somewhere along the way, too much of this industry started feeling transactional, disconnected, and centered around productivity instead of people.
Too many doulas are quietly burning out while carrying households, emotional labor, overnight shifts, unpredictable schedules, and the pressure of being everything for everyone around them while receiving very little support themselves.
And the sad part is that many families are completely unaware that this is the culture they are often buying into.
Postpartum care was never supposed to feel clinical or transactional. It was never meant to be about simply “getting through shifts.”
Traditionally, postpartum support was rooted in community. People gathered around new parents. Meals were shared. Homes were tended to. Rest was protected. Care was collective.
My experiences in this work changed me. It made me think about the kind of birthwork culture we are creating, the kinds of environments doulas are expected to tolerate, and what true community actually looks like in this field.
