A Rising Tide Lifts All Boats: On Community, Credit, and Showing Up for Each Other

I've been doing this work for a long time. Since 1991, actually — long before I ever attended a birth, long before I had a certification or a training program or a website. I was doing healing work with women when doula wasn't even a word most people recognized. So when I talk about community, about lineage, about honoring the work of others, I'm not speaking from a few years of experience. I'm speaking from over three decades of showing up.

Long enough to have watched the birth worker community grow from a fringe conversation into a genuine movement, long enough to have trained under people whose work changed how I practice, and long enough to have crossed paths with approaches, methodologies, and frameworks that didn't originate with me but shaped me anyway.

That's how it's supposed to work.

Knowledge in birth work doesn't travel in straight lines. It moves the way birth itself moves: organically, through bodies and relationships and rooms, passed from one practitioner to another, adapted and deepened with every family we serve. The doula who taught you something borrowed it from someone who borrowed it from someone else, all the way back to grandmothers and midwives who never wrote anything down at all.

And if we're being honest about that lineage, we have to name who those grandmothers and midwives often were. Black women. Indigenous women. Women whose knowledge was extraordinary, whose outcomes were remarkable, and whose expertise was systematically pushed out, co-opted, or erased as white medical institutions consolidated control over birth. The history of birth work in this country is inseparable from the history of whose knowledge gets credited and whose gets taken without acknowledgment.

Honoring that lineage isn't weakness. It's integrity. And it requires more than a passing nod.

The Gatekeeping Problem

There is a particular kind of professional insecurity that shows up in birth work more often than it should. It looks like this: someone decides that a methodology, a framework, or an approach belongs to them in a way that excludes others. They police who gets to use certain language, certain techniques, certain ideas. They treat the work like a territory to be defended rather than a tide to be raised.

I understand where it comes from. Birth workers, especially those who have spent years building something, often do so without institutional backing, without significant financial reward, and without the professional recognition their expertise deserves. When you've poured that much of yourself into something, the fear of losing credit feels real.

That fear is especially understandable for Black birth workers, Indigenous birth workers, and practitioners of color who have watched their knowledge absorbed into mainstream frameworks without credit, their practices dismissed as unscientific until white researchers validated them, and their presence in the field actively marginalized by the same institutions that quietly borrowed their wisdom. The history of credit in birth work is not neutral. Knowing that history should make all of us more generous with attribution, not less.

But gatekeeping doesn't protect the work. It diminishes it.

When birth workers spend energy policing each other instead of serving families, families lose. When we treat every colleague as a competitor instead of a collaborator, we make the community smaller, not stronger. When we demand credit in ways that shame rather than educate, we push people away from approaches that could genuinely help their clients.

What I Actually Believe

I believe there is enough. Enough families who need support. Enough room for multiple frameworks. Enough space for disagreement and different approaches to coexist without one invalidating the other.

I believe in citing my sources. When I use an approach rooted in someone else's research or methodology, I say so. Not because I'm required to, but because it's accurate, and because accuracy matters in a field where trust is everything.

I believe in learning from everyone. I have trained with people whose broader worldview I don't share, and I have taken something valuable from every single one of those experiences. That's not inconsistency. That's how growth works.

I believe that the families we serve are best supported when birth workers are connected to each other, not competing with each other. A network of practitioners who refer, collaborate, and communicate produces better outcomes than a landscape of isolated providers protecting their turf.

I believe that how we treat each other in this community is a direct reflection of the values we claim to hold for the families we serve. If we preach informed consent, we should practice it in our professional disagreements. If we preach autonomy, we should honor other practitioners' right to make their own training and practice choices. If we preach respect, we should lead with it even when we're frustrated.

On Honoring Work That Isn't Yours

Crediting the people whose work has shaped you is not a transaction. It's a practice. It's something you do because it's true, because it builds trust, and because it models the kind of intellectual honesty we want to see more of in this field.

That said, crediting is different from deference. You can honor someone's contribution to your practice without agreeing with everything they say, without remaining in a professional relationship that isn't serving you, and without shrinking your own expertise to make space for theirs.

The goal is not flattery. It's accuracy and generosity.

The Student Becomes the Teacher. And Then the Teacher Becomes the Student Again.

There's an idea I keep coming back to, one that every great teacher seems to arrive at eventually: the student becomes the teacher, and then the teacher becomes the student again.

I conduct a lot of classes. I am often the one at the front of the room, the one with the credentials and the curriculum and the years of births behind me. And I can tell you honestly that some of the most important things I know, I learned from the people sitting across from me.

Every cohort brings someone who asks the question I've stopped asking because I forgot I didn't always know the answer. Someone who has lived something I've only read about. Someone who pushes back on a framework I've held loosely for years and makes me hold it better. Someone whose story reframes something I thought I understood completely.

I am not up at the front of the room dispensing wisdom from on high. I am in the room with people who have chosen to do hard, meaningful work, and that choice alone tells me something about who they are.

When my students succeed, I'm not proud of them in the abstract way a trainer might check a box. I'm genuinely, embarrassingly thrilled. When someone I've trained attends their first birth, lands their first client, gets through a hard situation with grace, or builds something of their own, I feel it. Because their success is the whole point. It's why I do this. Their growth is not separate from mine. It is mine.

A rising tide, remember? That goes both ways. They lift me too.

The Tide Metaphor Is Real

A rising tide lifts all boats. But let's be clear about something: a tide that only lifts certain boats, that channels its energy toward practitioners who already have platforms and credentials and institutional access, isn't a rising tide. It's a current with a preference.

The real rising tide is one that centers the birth workers who have historically been excluded, underpaid, and uncredited. It's one that names its sources, pays its teachers, and makes room at the table for people who weren't invited to pull up a chair. It's one that recognizes that community over competition is not just a feel-good philosophy. It's a reproductive justice imperative.

When birth workers are well-trained, well-supported, and working from a place of integrity, families benefit. When certifying organizations produce graduates who know what they're doing, the entire field gains credibility. When educators share what's working, the next generation of practitioners is better equipped.

None of that happens in silos. None of it happens through competition. It happens because people decide, repeatedly and sometimes against their instincts, to lead with generosity instead of scarcity.

I've made that choice consistently over the years I've been doing this work. Not because it's always easy, and not because everyone has reciprocated it. But because it's the practitioner I decided to be before I ever attended my first birth, and nothing that has happened since has changed my mind.

The work is bigger than any of us. That's not a threat. That's the whole point.

Lorie Michaels is the founder of BirthPro Doula Training and Family Education, a DONA-certified doula trainer, childbirth educator, and Spinning Babies-informed bodywork practitioner based in Rhode Island. She has been attending births and supporting families since 2013.

Connect at connect@birthpro.org or visit birthpro.org.