Birth Companions:

What is the difference between doulas and midwives?

A doula and a midwife - the difference is very simple. It really is a case of... in the past, a doula and a midwife might have been the exact same person. However, with the way medical technology and medical advances has happened, a midwife is now more has also the clinical tasks that are very strongly involved with actually delivering the baby.

A doula, however, is only a support person, meaning that they do not perform any clinical tasks. They are not medical professionals. They are simply support persons. They are professional support persons.

The midwife has a medical license to actually deliver the baby into the world. However, a doula does not have the medical license to do that. She is your support person. Your go-between.

Midwives, at one point in time, were not under the insurance companies. And now that they do fall under insurance companies, they now have a lot of the tasks that doctors, M.D.s, have. Meaning they have the paperwork, they have multiple patients, they have a lot more responsibilities than they had in the past, where they could attend to one woman for the entire time of their pregnancy.

And actually, a midwife used to be the woman who took care of you from the minute you became a woman, your puberty, all the way to your grave, was a midwife. But in this day and age, that doesn’t happen any more.

Doulas became more... became used more when that happened. When midwives became more along the doctors’ side, the MD side.

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