Gracefully Tended Doula Care

I came to this work the way many doulas do: through my own passage. My path to parenthood ran through infertility, IVF, a high-risk twin pregnancy, a NICU stay, and saving of one of my children. As an engineer and scientist I often sat in my clinic office thinking through the data, reviewing test results, and attempting to understand ultrasounds on my own, while holding my personal desire and heart to be a parent. I bring an unusual combination to doula care. Before founding Gracefully Tended, I have worked in technology and higher education as a research scientist working on responsible technology — studying how technical systems affect human lives, agency, and wellbeing. That training shapes everything about my practice: it is evidence-based, educative, and honest about what the research does and doesn't say. When you work with me, you get someone who can read the studies, explain the monitors, question the protocols, and help you understand the technology increasingly woven into fertility, pregnancy, and end-of-life care — including what happens to your data.

Like my technical work, this work is theoretically grounded and methodologically rich. Reproductive justice — the right to have children, to not have children, and to parent the children we have in safe and sustainable communities, coined by the incredible Loretta Ross whom I have learned from directly for years is my outlook to this work. My work draws on that framework and on the Black feminist and womanist thinkers who shaped my understanding of care: Alice Walker's commitment to "survival and wholeness of entire people," Audre Lorde's insistence that caring for ourselves and each other is a serious, political act, and the knowledge traditions that treat lived experience as real evidence.

Gracefully Tended means exactly that: your passage, whatever it holds, tended with grace —composure, skill, dignity — and with attention that never wavers.