Podcast

Episode Summary Insurance coverage for doulas sounds like a win for everyone. More clients, broader access, sustainable practice. But the reality is messier than the headline, and Dr. Robin Elise Weiss and Dr. Hillary Melchiors have both lived that reality from opposite sides of the billing process. Robin brings a background in health management system […]

Episode Summary No-shows are one of those topics birth professionals talk about in private but rarely address out loud. In this episode, Robin and Hillary get into both types of no-shows that doulas actually deal with: the potential client who ghosts a consultation, and the client who goes into labor without ever picking up the

Episode Summary On this episode of TBG 2026, Dr. Hillary Melchiors sits down with clinical psychologist Kerry Makin-Byrd for an honest, experienced-grounded conversation about burnout, moral injury, and the emotional realities of long-term careers in birth and mental health work. Kerry Makin-Byrd shares her journey from Colorado to Wellington, New Zealand, reflecting on how changing

Episode Summary There is a version of this work where you stay quiet, play it safe, and hope the right clients find you. And then there is the version where you show up as exactly who you are and let the right families self-select in. Lisa Vee built her entire coaching practice on the second

Episode Summary If you’ve ever felt like you’re doing all the things and still not getting inquiries, the problem probably isn’t your skills or your passion. It’s that you’re not tracking the right information to know what’s actually working. In this episode, Hillary and I sit down again with Darcy Sauers, who started in corporate

Episode Summary Robin and Hillary dig into what experienced birth workers actually do after they leave a birth, and why having a deliberate post-birth routine matters for long-term sustainability. This conversation covers everything from the first private moment in your car to sleep, food, family dynamics, and the anthropology of ritual itself. It’s honest, occasionally

Episode Summary Infant sleep is one of those topics where the gap between what we’re told and what the evidence actually supports is enormous, and Ann Grauer doesn’t dance around that. In this episode, Ann, a former DONA International president and postpartum doula trainer with 33 years of experience, breaks down why so much of

Episode Summary Prodromal labor gets called a lot of things in birth spaces, and most of them are wrong. “False labor” is the one that bothers me most, because the moment you attach that word to someone’s contractions, you’ve handed the people around them permission to stop paying attention. The contractions are real. The exhaustion