• 🌀 About this zone
• Centering Consent and Empowering Parents
• Changing a Culture, Together
• 📷 Photo captions
• 🎧 Additional audio stories
• Tyisha (nurse) - True care comes when hospitals and doulas work as a team for the person giving birth
• 🔎 Learn more: Building Stronger Support Systems
• Additional doula and policy resources
• Research informing this exhibit

🌀 About this zone

the vital role of doulas

New Jersey continues to face a maternal health crisis, with rising rates of preventable deaths and reports of mistreatment during birth—especially among Black birthing parents. Many arrive at hospitals anxious and unsure, often delaying care due to fear and mistrust. Community doulas help shift this reality by providing consistent, culturally grounded support. Their presence improves outcomes and helps restore trust, but they are working within a system still in urgent need of reform.

Centering Consent and Empowering Parents

Doulas play a vital role in protecting consent during labor. They help parents understand their options, ask questions, and feel confident in making informed decisions. Their steady presence reduces stress, improves communication with medical staff, and helps ensure that birthing people remain active participants in their care. This work supports better outcomes and more respectful, affirming birth experiences.

Changing a Culture, Together

The culture of maternal care still allows bias, pressure, and even coercion to shape birthing experiences. Doulas often witness parents being dismissed or pressured into procedures they did not consent to. While doulas work to interrupt these harms, they cannot change the system alone. Real progress requires healthcare providers to partner with doulas, respect their role, and commit to the deep, collective work of dismantling racism and rebuilding trust in maternal care.

📷 Photo captions

Images from right to left:

1. Ahshayla coaches an expecting client through exercises on an exercise ball.
2. Ahshayla provides hands-on comfort to her client, massaging her while on an exercise ball.
3. Erica uses physical touch to help her client connect with her body.
4. Erica provides a postpartum massage to her client
5. Juju demonstrates how she educates expecting mothers and assures them that they are capable of labor and delivery.
6. A laboring parent at St Joseph’s Health is outfitted with a TENS unit (transcutaneous electrical nerve stimulation) to help manage their pain.
7. Jacquelyn and a parent in labor.
8. Nora uses a wet cold compress on a laboring parent’s neck and back as the parent was experiencing hot flashes.
9. Nora helps a laboring parent breathe through contractions..
10. A healthy and beautiful birth.
11. A family is born as parents and newborn share their first moments together.
12. Ahshayla breastfeeds her child.
13. Jaelyn, a teen mom, comes home to her family after working at a job her doula Juju helped her find.
14. Harmony continues to spend time and provide maternal care to the families she has supported.

🎧 Additional audio stories

Tyisha (nurse) - True care comes when hospitals and doulas work as a team for the person giving birth

🔎 Learn more: Building Stronger Support Systems

Explore these tools, reports, and studies to learn how hospitals, policymakers, and communities are strengthening support for doulas—and building a better future for birth.

Additional doula and policy resources

Research informing this exhibit