Podcast

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

Maggie Runyon joins us to talk nurse advocacy, savior culture, burnout, trauma recovery, and the community care that keeps birth professionals in this work.

Dr. Connie Liu on practicing OB at Gallup Indian Medical Center, the Indian Health Service, rural hospital closures, and the policy decisions that hit hardest.

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

Episode Summary Life on Call — Introduction In this episode of The Birth Geeks, Dr. Hillary Melchiors and Dr. Robin Elise Weiss invite listeners into the nitty-gritty of life on call as a birth worker. Together, they reflect on how being on call shapes everything from family routines to daily decisions, and the less glamorous