Why Understanding Fertility Makes You a Better Doula

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Real talk… even if you never plan to specialize in fertility support, understanding what your clients have been through before they hired you changes everything about how you show up for them.

Here is the thing most doula training programs do not tell you. A significant number of the families who hire birth and postpartum doulas have a fertility journey behind them. 

Sometimes years of it. 

IVF cycles, pregnancy losses, failed transfers, the relentless emotional grind of hoping and grieving month after month. And they arrive at your prenatal visit carrying all of that, often without saying so directly, because they have learned that most people do not really get it.

If you do not understand what they have been through, you cannot fully support them through what comes next.

Bianca’s honest admission about fertility knowledge gaps

Bianca, the founder of bebo mia, has been doing this work for nearly 20 years. And she will be the first to tell you that for a long time she was not as good a support person as she could have been for clients and people in her life who had fertility journeys.

One of her closest friends spent six years trying to conceive. Year after year of specialists and healers and hope and loss. Bianca, who had gotten pregnant easily twice, did not know what to say. She listened without truly understanding. She said things that were well meaning and unhelpful. She looked back on that time and felt a knot in her stomach because she genuinely did not have the education or the framework to show up the way her friend needed.

The same gap showed up in her doula work. When birth clients shared their fertility stories, she would listen but not really feel the weight of what they were describing. The education was not there yet.

Knowing more means doing better. That is true for all of us.

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What you might be saying without realizing it

Here is a list of things people say to those who are trying to conceive, almost always with good intentions, that land as dismissals every single time.

• “Just relax and it will happen.” 
• “Have you tried this supplement or that position?” 
• “You have only been trying for eight months, that is nothing.” 
• “My cousin adopted and then got pregnant.” 
• “At least you can sleep in and travel.” 
• “Maybe it is just not meant to be.” 
• “Everything happens for a reason.” 
• “Why don’t you just adopt?” 
• “It will happen when it is supposed to.”

And the one that is not a specific phrase but is just as harmful: complaining about your own pregnancy or parenting experience to someone who is desperately trying to conceive. Even if you are their doula and even if it feels like honest relating, it lands as a gut punch every time.

These phrases communicate, without meaning to, that the person’s grief is not valid, that their struggle has a simple solution they have not thought of, or that there is a reason this is happening to them that makes it somehow okay. 

None of that is true and none of it helps.

With proper fertility doula training, you stop saying these things not just because you have been told not to but because you understand why they cause harm. That understanding changes how you show up in every conversation, not just with fertility clients but with everyone in your community who is navigating reproductive challenges. 

Hello better friend/sibling/co-worker/congregation member etc. 

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What fertility doula training actually teaches you

A good fertility doula training does not just add a new service to your menu. I mean, it will help you get more clients… but more importantly, it fills in gaps that most standard doula programs never touch.

You will learn the full landscape of reproductive health including the menstrual cycle and hormonal health, common causes of infertility, ART including IUI, IVF, egg freezing, donor eggs and sperm, surrogacy, and embryo adoption. You will learn about pregnancy loss and the specific cumulative grief that builds over a long trying to conceive journey. You will learn about mindfulness and reconnecting the mind and body, which is a significant and often overlooked part of supporting people through fertility challenges.

You will also learn the language. The acronyms and abbreviations and shorthand that fertility communities use. TWW, BFN, BFP, RE, FET. You will stop asking clients to translate and you can jump into their care feeling confident and in the know. This means less work for our clients who already have to do so much self advocacy to ensure they are getting the care they need. 

And you will understand the emotional landscape in a way that makes every other part of your doula work richer. When a birth client tells you they went through three years of IVF to get pregnant, you will know what that actually means. You will understand the hypervigilance of a pregnancy after loss. You will know why certain comments from providers hit differently for someone who fought hard to be in that birth room. You will know how to hold the complicated emotional layers of a pregnancy that came after grief.

This is what makes you an awesome doula!

The families already in your practice who need this

Secondary infertility is more common than most people realize. Clients who had a straightforward first pregnancy sometimes face significant challenges the second time around. They come back to you for postpartum support or a second birth and they are carrying a fertility story you do not know about yet.

Your existing network is also full of people navigating fertility challenges in silence. A simple message letting your community know you understand this space will bring people to you who have been looking for someone like you for a long time.

Understanding fertility does not require you to specialize in it. But it does require you to be educated about it. Because the families you serve deserve a doula who understands the full arc of their reproductive journey.

You can find out more about the bebo mia Fertility Support Specialist Certification here.

If you want to talk through whether this is the right next step for your practice, book a free doula career strategy session or email us at [email protected].

Come join us, sweet doula.

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