About Julie
Hello! My name is Julie (they/she), and I am a full-spectrum doula keen on prioritizing care work that centers being an advocate, joy-seeker, and companion for families and individuals desiring community support during periods of great transition.
As a full-spectrum doula, I offer my services of care for a range of experiences within the perinatal lifecycle: pregnancy, birth, postpartum, abortion, loss, and beyond. And above all - I aspire to connect pregnant and birthing people with themselves and their communities so that family networks can thrive during these liminal spaces and incredible rites of passage - however they may unfold. Whatever your personal story is, I hope to uplift and embrace it, non-judgmentally supporting families and providing a tailored alchemy of emotional, educational, logistical, and advocacy support in planning and preparing for the journey you are about to embark on. From home birth to planned cesarean, from elective termination to a heart-wrenching loss, I am here to hold space for the experience and process that feels most in tune with your needs, whatever your preferences are. We can figure it out together. All families deserve to be held with care during these transitions, and I look forward to welcoming all the emotions that come up to help you find the most powerful, informed, safe, loving experience you can imagine.
Luna Maya Birth Center in San Cristobal, Mexico, where I spent part of 2019
My approach to and interest in working within birth work and care work spaces acknowledges the necessity in being radical - specifically, radical in the ways we frame our community-building to be explicitly anti-racist, anti-capitalist, anti-colonialist, abolitionist, and trauma-informed. After all, as Angela Davis says, “radical simply means grasping things at the root,” and birth work grasps at the very roots of our societal and familial structures and questions how we can better uplift not only ourselves, but our entire communities. There is no self-care without community care, and I hope to show up for families in the unique ways they are called to receive support. By nurturing the roots of a new life or a new transitional moment, doula work plants the seeds for new worlds that we can imagine together. Well-supported children, parents, families, and communities are the revolution.
As a queer and non-binary person myself, I have had lived experience with the importance of -- as doula and advocate Chanel Porchia-Albert says -- "centering the center." Rather than pushing out those on the margins, my practice aims to "center the center" and prioritizes frameworks that are inclusive, accessible, and equitable. There is no alternative. As I continue in this work for decades to come as an aspiring midwife, I am committed to continuing these efforts by forever connecting, collaborating, and learning with my revolutionary birthwork comrades.
“Transformation does not have a name or a label, it has a sound. Listen. Listen closely. Can you hear it?”
-Lisa Factora-Borchers,
Radical Mothering: Love on the Front Lines
My Path to Becoming Honeysuckle Doula
For as long as I can remember, I’ve been fascinated by childbirth and babies (evidenced by my hand on mama’s belly, yet to meet my younger sibling). My official journey into birth work, however, began at 19 years old, when I worked at the nation's only dual birth center / abortion clinic. I spent weeks with a team of midwives, OBGYNs, doulas, nurses, and assistants seeing a full spectrum of perinatal health that revolutionized how I’d previously been taught about reproductive care and transformed it to one of reproductive justice. Under one roof, I was able to attend prenatal appointments, assist with over 100 abortions, meet newborn babies, and attend unmedicated vaginal births. Oh, the roller coaster of emotions I experienced! The absolute full-body joy witnessing two parents transform from individuals to parents, roaring their baby into the world with a complete sense of safety and belonging. The profound awe as I tenderly held patients’ hands as they went through with their surgical terminations – for a million more reasons than I could ever imagine, all of them valid, all of them cracking at our society's misunderstanding of abortion. The immense anger hearing the right-wing protesters chant outside the doors each morning, claiming that abortion and birth cannot belong under the same roof. And why not? To honor pregnant peoples’ decisions and trust that they, themselves, know what is best – to hold space for the wide spectrum of reproductive choice and autonomy – that is every human’s right.
After that, I continued in the birthwork sphere working at multiple community health centers, peer education centers, and a major perinatal mental health start-up connecting postpartum people with perinatal mood and anxiety disorders (PMADs). I went on to spend a semester in India learning from traditional birth attendants, wrote an undergraduate thesis on America's Black maternal health crisis and the potential benefits of midwifery-based care grounded in the origins of Black Grand Midwives in the Antebellum South, spent a year pre-pandemic learning about sacred birth traditions and rituals in Central/South America and Africa, and now have just returned from one year in India studying the implications of support networks during pregnancy, birth, and postpartum. My full-spectrum doula work has found its way around the world for the past 7 years, and I am honored to now be planting roots back in my hometown of Brooklyn, eager to connect with families and individuals in the place I call home.
Training and Professional Development Experience
Comforting Touch for Doulas by Yiska Obadia, 2024
Reiki I, trained by Marta Hernandez, 2024
Postpartum Belly Binding by La Matriz Birth, 2024
Plant Medicines for the Reproductive Spectrum by Colibri Corazon, 2024
Cesarean Birth: A Compassionate Approach for Birthworkers by Birthing from Within
The Pelvic Floor: A Workshop for Doulas and Birthworkers by Sonia Reiter, 2024
Crisis Response for Birthworkers by Stefanie Lyn Kaufman-Mthimkhulu, 2023
Adult/Pediatric CPR and AED Red Cross Certified, 2023
Humanizing Birth Conference by Critical Midwifery Studies, 2022
Fulbright-Nehru Student Researcher in Perinatal Health in India, 2022
BADT Full-Spectrum Doula Certification, 2021
Reproductive Futurism Conference by Doula Chronicles, 2020
Cultural Appropriation in Rebozo Work by Montse Olmos, 2020
Beyond the Baster LGBTQ Family Planning Workshop by Ray Rachlin, 2020
PMAD Care Coordinator & Patient Navigator for The Motherhood Center, 2020-2021
The Art of Accompanying Birth Workshop by Naoli Vinaver, 2019
Thomas J. Watson Fellow in Guatemala, Mexico, Brasil, and Uganda, 2019 (Instagram)
Vassar College Thesis Award for
Black Birthing Mothers: Historical Context & Potential Benefits of Midwifery, 2019Ancient Song Doula Services Full Spectrum Doula Training, 2019
Abortion and Birth Doula Assistant at Birthing Center of Buffalo, 2017
who am I outside of doula work?
Although doula work and care work extend to most corners of my life because they are inherently political, outside of these spaces I am a budding herbalist and tea lover, a daily yoga practitioner, an indulgent baker, a forest bather and nature enthusiast, a road tripper, a silly dancer, a bad painter, an ocean swimmer, a cat parent, and an aspiring polyglot (my German and French heritage gifted me with two beautiful first languages before English and I’ve picked up some Spanish, Portuguese, and Hindi while working abroad). Any and all of these are welcome into my doula work as well, as so desired :)