Spotlight Series

Guest Name: Katie Foerster

Experienced: Birth and Postpartum Doula

All right, welcome Katie. Thank you so much for being on our spotlight series for the Best in Utah Pelvic Health, and I’m going to read your bio here for everyone in the audience listening, and then we’ll jump into all the fun questions we have for you. Let’s do it.

All right, so Katie is a passionate and experienced birth and postpartum doula. She believes in empowering women to embrace their birth experience with confidence and joy. Katie’s approach is rooted in mindfulness and holistic care, drawing upon her own transformative birth experiences and extensive training.

As the founder of Freya Birth, a thriving doula agency, Katie leads a team of skilled doulas who provide compassion and individualized support to families throughout pregnancy, birth, and postpartum period. She is deeply committed to fostering a sense of community and creating a positive and empowering birth culture. Thank you, Katie, for being on.

I’m excited to be here. Thank you. Let’s start in on the first question of what made you decide to be a doula and then own a doula agency.

My story is pretty common for a lot of doulas, where my first birth, I didn’t really know what was going on. I went in and just had a really hard time. It was a really difficult experience.

I thought I was prepared, but it was really hard. When my second baby came around, I was like, okay, something’s got to give. That was not fun.

There has to be another way. I dove down into a childbirth ed class and just felt like my eyes were opened. It really unlocked a passion for me.

My husband would always joke after that baby that if I met anybody with a uterus, that birth would creep into the conversation. He’s like, you’ve got to do something with that. At that point, we moved back to America.

We were in Germany for those two births. Every friend I had had these awful experiences. They would tell me about their awful birth experiences.

It was so sad to me because I’d just come off this super powerful one. None of them, I don’t think, knew what a doula was. One friend was like, have you heard of a doula? I went and researched it and was like, that’s a job.

How cool. I just Googled the next training and never looked back. It’s been a really beautiful journey over the last seven years.
I’ve changed completely what I thought a doula was and how I approach it just through my experiences. I’m so grateful. It’s hard to say you’re grateful for a really rough birth, but at the same time, it woke me up and set me on this path to being a doula.

Amazing. What do you feel makes you different, whether that’s you yourself as a doula or your doula agency compared to any other doula that’s out there? One thing is that we’re very trauma-informed. That’s one of our passion topics is just understanding that people come with a complex emotional background, whether it be an actual traumatic situation they’ve been through.

We have a lot of people with medical trauma history, people with sexual trauma history. That’s something we specialize in that not every doula does. Another is our holistic approach.

We’re all on our own crunchy journey, somewhere in the spectrum. All of us are pretty passionate and general around more natural remedies, herbal homeopathic remedies and things. That’s where a lot of our counseling will come in of people who also want to take those options first before turning to more modern medication.

That’s something we offer that definitely isn’t what everybody does. Amazing. Who would be an ideal fit for you as a doula? We love people who want to do the work.

People who come in saying, hey, I’m doing this research and this is what I found and this is how I feel. They really want someone to supply them with more resources and just support them in their journey. We love really self-starter women.

I also love people who are very self-aware and working on their healing journey. A lot of people talk about where they’re like, oh, this is what might come up for me. That’s a lot of my conversations center around, okay, what might show up at birth? How do you want to show up at birth? Just having those conversations more like a coaching aspect and we’re covering people pleasers are my other all-time favorite.

I love people who are like, I used to people please or I currently people please and I want to stop it. I want this birth to be a way that I advocate for myself and I would love your support in advocating with and helping me to stand up for myself. I love it.

What does the process look like to work with someone in your company then?

The inquiry comes in through me and I usually concierge people. I help you to figure out which doula personality could be fit the budget because we have a range of budget between 1250 and 2000 for our doulas and I help you to connect with those doulas and you meet up with them and have consultations with everyone that you’d like to. We often have periodic meet the doulas as well where you can kind of come and meet multiple people at the same time and then once you’re ready I help you with all of the back end and then you’ll get periodic emails from me throughout pregnancy but your doula will be the main support person for you and it kind of gets turned over and your doula takes care of you.

So I’m there for more of the beginning and some support and then your doula is your person.

Amazing. Okay and then this is a big lofty question which has lots of different answers but what does recovery look like through your lens as a doula? Recovery?

Yeah from like pregnancy postpartum. I think that it’s important to me to talk about postpartum because a lot of people have these big birth plans they focus all this attention on the birth itself and then postpartum just kind of is like oh like that’s just is like where I’ll that’s just after I don’t know like I’ll cuddle a baby but to sit and talk to people about know like what’s normal I think it’s a big thing for a doula is the troubleshooting right where they can come and like I can help with minor things I can help like adjust minor troubleshooting but I can also be the person who says girl please go see a pelvic floor PT please go see Betty or I can say hey I really think with the way you’re talking about it I think your baby could go use some like IBCLC support or get checked for tongue ties or just offer them different directions so I love being that resource where it’s like bounce things off me and then I can help you to see if this is like this is pretty normal here’s some like troubleshooting or is it time to like go and see somebody else for the recovery but I in general I think pelvic floor PT is like it should be a I had my first two babies in Germany and it was standard there was a 12-week program that everybody was fully paid for by insurance to go through that was led by a PT and if during those 12 weeks the PT felt like you needed extra support you were it was a paid by insurance to go see the PT as long as necessary there’s no questions asked and there was nothing out of pocket and I felt like that really helped my first two recoveries like I felt so strong afterwards I was able to get back into my movement pretty quickly because I had somebody who was telling me like what kinds of movement were good and just checking to see what was going on especially my first birth because I had an episiotomy and a vacuum birth which are both pretty intense for the tissues so I’m always talking a lot about just in general like how do I nourish myself and who can I go and see that will help me to come back to thriving.

we love to make people thriving. I want people to thrive huge okay one of my favorite questions to ask is what’s something that most people don’t know that you think that they should know about your services.

I think because we’re holistic people think like we don’t aren’t willing to support like epidurals or cesarean births and I think there is a huge benefit in having a support person who’s focused on you and knowing that even if you do take those routes there’s still so many options and you still deserve to have it be a very positive experience centered around you and your your desires and a lot of times those two kind of get on the bandwagon of the way the medicine world does it and it kind of rolls off with you so having someone to keep you centered and grounded can be very beautiful I would say that’s one of the biggest misconceptions people have yeah.

love that that’s that’s so important okay do you have anything special that you want to promote to the audience watching here anything that you have exciting coming up.

um we have we’re planning on doing more activities this year like more in person things so we’re going to be having meet the doulas events which I kind of mentioned earlier more often this year where you can come and kind of feel us out and get the feel without having to make like three or four separate appointments you just come to one nice event and we’ll have some fun giveaways for that too so that’s going to be fun yeah and then we do an event uh three times a year called a village blessing and that’s a really beautiful way to come kind of connect with your pregnancy it’s not centered as much around childbirth education as it is around really just celebrating what this phase you’re in we do art and journaling and movement just to be very it’s very body centered and very connective yes.

oh amazing and you sometimes you host them at reborn yes we have is and then what’s the main thing that you personally katie you want to be known?

for that’s a great great question I think my big passion lies with trauma and just women understanding how to heal and healing being a physical thing but healing also being an emotional thing and a spiritual thing and just being I love bringing those worlds together where we understand like that holistic side there’s so many parts of us and we deserve to have the tools and support we need to thrive in all those sides and I also my other big impact I want to have is I want doulas to last I was just talking to a doula friend of mine um that I trained we trained around the same time I think we’re it like in the state of Utah I feel like there’s not many other doulas left that trained it and like within a year of us that are still practicing yeah and that burnout rate has just been famous throughout doula history that there’s so many doulas that train and they burn out and so one of the things that is important to me and my agency is that sustainability factor.

how can I help doulas thrive how can I be an example to them and how can I mentor them.

um so that they can stick around because we need experienced doulas it’s sad that we don’t everybody just drops out and then we have new beginners who just have to figure it out again.

so that’s the other thing I would love to change in the world love that hey where can we find you.

website social media all the things like that yeah so um for looking at our services our website’s does a pretty good job explaining what we do and getting to know us that’s www.freyabirth.com and then I run a very active instagram and that’s also just at freyabirth

amazing thank you so much Katie for all that you’re doing in the community for us here in Utah.

thanks Betty and thanks for taking the time with me today you’re welcome.