We are now ABC Doula & Newborn Care!
We opened our doors as After Baby Comes Doula Service in 2001, then changed our name to ABC Doula Service in 2003 for simplicity when we expanded our team, and now we are ABC Doula & Newborn Care. Why? Because we have always taken care of newborns and didn't want them left out!
Although the doula role is focused on caring for parents as our primary focus, we often find ourselves caring for babies in order to lighten the load on new parents. After meeting Newborn Care Specialists (NCS) from all over the US, I found that the role we were playing in Portland, OR was similar to the hybrid role. We focus both on parents and babies, and allow families to decide where they want the focus to be. Since we were essentially already doing that, we decided to make it official and get formal NCS training so that we could better meet the needs of parents needing our help.
Many of our doula team are also NCS, giving both that newborn and new parent focus that so many families are looking for. What does this mean for clients? First, it means we maintain our doula focus to support parents in whatever way they want or need care, AND second that we also can provide more extensive newborn care when parents need a break, have an appointment to attend, or just need sleep and someone who knows exactly what to do to keep their family humming along. We know parents want to spend as much time as they are able with their newborns, but we also acknowledge that great parenting comes in 100 different flavors, and we come to help parents be their best, which looks different for each family we serve. Some families need education and support with basics like holding babies while parents rest, nutritional support for healing, and gentle understanding while families process their birth and parenting transitions. Some families need an out of the box expert on newborns, so that with their input on what they know about their unique baby, we can problem solve together to solve struggles such as breastfeeding difficulties, sleep resistance, reflux, colic, or postpartum depression or anxiety.
Getting training that is focused on newborns as well as parents helps us offer a wider range of services that we honestly never considered weren’t within our range of offerings. Postpartum doulas have a scope of practice that limited long hours spent alone with a newborn (not something we get many requests for) and not having parents leave babies in our care regularly, as we would want reliable childcare in place for these needs. But we never considered that caring for baby wouldn’t be included int he doula role, as it has always been a part of what we do.
When we started, there were no Newborn Care Specialists (NCS) working in the Portland metro area, and actually this term wasn’t even coined until 2009. Before that everyone called this role a Baby Nurse, which is now no longer a term we use outside of someone who is licensed professional such as an RN, LPN, or other professional who has medical training and is credentialed as a nurse. As this is protected state by state, we consider it illegal to use the term Baby Nurse unless the professional has a nursing license (and we note any doulas who have this credential in their bio).
There are many other terms that people associate with our job; night nurse, night nanny, midwife, maternity nurse, and so on. All of these are valuable roles to serve families! When families reach out to us for help, we try to be clear on what we are offering, as it can be confusing outside of this industry, and the roles overlap so much! We wanted our name to be clear to strangers (that we get to meet all the time as the turnover in our business is quick!) so we added something to clarify that loving babies and providing competent care for them as their parents adjust to newborn life is a big part of what we do!
That is why we renamed our business. So everyone would know that although we are doulas first and foremost, we are here for babies as well as parents. :)