My Background

My name is Sarah Wholey and I grew up in Arlington and attended Virginia Tech where I met my husband of 15 years. I have a M.S. in Sociology and my masters thesis involved birth outcomes for women Hispanic women in California.

I bought The American Way of Birth at a Sociology conference I attended while pregnant early in my marriage. I was unfortunate to find that, like a third of first pregnancies, I miscarried shortly after that.

I was able to become pregnant shortly after that and I had a wonderful, planned home birth. I studied Bradley with my husband and had Certified Nurse Midwives in attendance. Many friends had babies around the same time, several of them ending up with Cesarians or other complications. I knew that part of my son's birth story was luck and another part of it was that we had educated ourselves and had picked medical care givers who believed in the natural abilities of moms and babies bodies to have safe births.

As soon as I heard about doulas, I knew I wanted to become one. I learned about the various certification options and studied with Doulas of North America. I attended my first birth as a doula in December 2003 and became certified two years later.