EBB 255 – Teaching Girls What They Need to Know About Their Bodies with Laurisa Paul, RN, EBB Pro Member and Founder of Girls Who Know®

Check out Laurisa’s organization Girls Who Know® here 
Follow Laurisa on social media via Instagram here and her Facebook here 

Rebecca Dekker:

Hi, everyone. On today’s podcast, we’re going to talk with Laurisa Paul, registered nurse, EBB pro member and founder of Girls Who Know® about her journey towards teaching girls what they need to know and respect about their bodies.

Welcome to the Evidence Based Birth® podcast. My name is Rebecca Dekker and I’m a nurse with my PhD and I’m the founder of Evidence Based Birth®. Join me each week as we work together to get evidence-based information into the hands of families and professionals around the world. As a reminder, this information is not medical advice. See ebb.com/disclaimer for more details.

Hi, everyone. My name is Rebecca Dekker, pronouns she her and I’ll be your host for today’s episode. If there are any detailed content or trigger warnings, we always post them in the description or show notes that go along with this episode. Now I’d like to introduce our honored guest. Today I’m so excited to welcome Laurisa Paul, pronouns she/her, a registered nurse, advocate for home birth and midwives, and the founder of Girls Who Know®, an organization that inspires girls to love who they are and to know and respect their bodies. Girls Who Know® prepares girls with what they need to know to make courageous informed decisions for their lives.

Laurisa resides in Texas where she is a mother of five and an outdoor adventurer. She seeks to improve the world by helping others love themselves fully and feel their inherent worth and power. Laurisa believes these truths can be discovered through pregnancy, birth, and motherhood. Medically trained, Laurisa stumbled across home birth when she was actively seeking to improve her own birth experiences and since then she has worked as a midwife assistant. She is an Evidence Based Birth® pro member winner of our September challenge, which is why she’s getting this feature on the podcast, an alumni of the Evidence Based Birth® instructor program. We’re so thrilled that Laurisa is here.

Welcome to the Evidence Based Birth® podcast.

Laurisa Paul:

Thank you, Rebecca. Thank you for inviting me.

Rebecca Dekker:

Yeah, you are a registered nurse and I know I’ve seen you on our nurse specialty calls and the EBB Pro membership, but did you always see yourself working in the birth world? How did you find your way into this field?

Laurisa Paul:

Yeah, I actually did always see myself being a nurse. When I was a young girl, I had a picture of a nurse holding a baby hanging on my wall and that was just kind of my touchpoint where I knew I was going with my life and it hung there my whole childhood. I did know I was going to be a nurse, it wasn’t any kind of question, but the process of getting from there to where I am now was really windy, really slow and steady learning and unconventional, I would say.

Rebecca Dekker:

Yeah. Tell us a little bit about how you got started.

Laurisa Paul:

From the last question, so I came out of nursing school … Well, let’s go before nursing school actually, I grew up not knowing. I was a girl who did not know. When I say that, I mean I didn’t know much about my body, I definitely didn’t know and respect its inherent power and the things that it was capable of. In fact, I grew up really in this belief that my body was frustrating and I really had some body image issues and carried those into my young adulthood. That was the first thing I didn’t know. The other thing I didn’t know, I was really young when I had my first baby, actually it was before I got in nursing school, so I was just barely 20 years old and I didn’t know anything about birth. I didn’t know anything about preparing myself or things I needed to know.

I went in to the hospital. I assumed that you go to the hospital and everyone takes great care of you and had my first baby at 20 years old and his birth was, I would say average, it was what a lot of hospital births are, but a lot of interventions happened. I had an epidural, I had Pitocin. I was forced to lay on my back for hours and hours and hours. I had an IV. I had, at the end last stage when I was pushing, he wasn’t coming of course, because I was flat on my back for so long, and so they used a vacuum and they used forceps and they cut in an episiotomy and I pushed and pushed for hours and hours. I remember when he finally came out just feeling like, “What just happened to me?” This great sense of … I felt like I’d been run over by a truck. My body was just kind of mutilated.

Of course I was so happy he was here and I was a new mom and all those emotions but I carried a lot of beliefs about what motherhood was from that birth experience.

Rebecca Dekker:

Like motherhood was suffering or trauma or …

Laurisa Paul:

Yeah, motherhood is just sacrificing everything that you have for this other person and that’s a really painful belief to carry into beginning your motherhood journey.

A few years later, I had my second and I was in nursing school when I was pregnant with him. I remember sitting in my maternal newborn nursing class and we’re just talking about regular medicalized birth and they’re teaching us the pharmacology and the gal in that class, in the back corner, raised her hand and said, “I just have to interject here and say that that women can give birth on their own with their own power. We don’t have to intervene. In fact, I did it last year and it changed my whole life.”

It was like everything around me stopped in that moment and I looked over at her and I was like, “That message was for you.” I knew that message was for me. I had never heard of anyone giving birth without medication up to this point just because I wasn’t exposed to that. It wasn’t in my frame of reference, I was really young so none of my friends had had babies. My sisters are younger, everybody was younger. Anyway, I was really intrigued. I was like, “What is she talking about that she loved her birth experience and that it changed her for the better?” But I was nine months pregnant and I had just started nursing school and so I knew that it was something to consider in the future, but that I didn’t have the space to even do any kind of learning.

Rebecca Dekker:

You felt like it was too late at that point to make any changes or do research or figure out what you were going to do.

Laurisa Paul:

Yeah. ‘Cause I was overwhelmed with school and second baby and how it was all going to work out. I proceeded with my birth plan, which was a scheduled induction. We had scheduled it around my clinicals because my instructors had kind of threatened me, but said, “You can’t miss a single clinical, you need to have this baby and be back in school.”

Rebecca Dekker:

A week later?

Laurisa Paul:

A week later, yes.

Rebecca Dekker:

You’re still bleeding and everything and they’re like, “You can’t miss the clinical rotation.”

Laurisa Paul:

Yes.

Rebecca Dekker:

Wow.

Laurisa Paul:

I’m probably 22 super young, super impressionable and I just want to please and I just want to get through nursing school. I just said, “Okay.”

We set up this induction for the evening of my clinical, so I was doing them every Tuesday, so Tuesday I went to my clinical rotation, then we had our induction and then I thought, “Okay, I’ll have six days before I have to be back to my next clinical,” which is wild. We did, we had an induction and that was a really interesting experience. I pretty much slept through it. I was just medicated really early on, they hooked me up to Pitocin, I went to sleep. I remember waking up in the morning and the nurse coming in to check me and being like, “Oh my gosh, your baby’s right there. You’re like having a baby. He’s crowning.”

I didn’t even know I was so medicated. I was so disconnected from at that time. I pushed his head came out, I pushed again, his body came out, he was born and that time I’m sitting there holding my baby like, “Okay. That was wild too. I think I’m supposed to be involved somehow.” I felt really disconnected, like, “Man. Yeah, here’s my baby and I didn’t really feel much, but that was weird to almost miss the birth.”

Rebecca Dekker:

It reminds me almost of twilight sleep when they used to put people to sleep and then you’d wake up and have a baby and doctors would taunt women who didn’t want that. They’re like, “What? You want to be awake? You want to participate in the process? That’s ridiculous.” You felt that though, you almost had that kind of experience where you’re so dissociated and disconnected that you wished you could have been more involved.

Laurisa Paul:

100%. Yep. That’s exactly what it was like for me. I felt really disconnected like, “That’s not how it’s supposed to be either.” That was such a hard time. I remember trying to nurse a new baby and be a new mom and in nursing school and I did go back to my next clinical. I ended up postpartum hemorrhaging at school and having to go to the ER and it just was so messy and complicated because I wasn’t resting and I didn’t know myself, I didn’t know my body, I didn’t know so much.

Rebecca Dekker:

You didn’t know you had a huge wound inside your uterus that wasn’t healed yet.

Laurisa Paul:

Yeah. Yeah, I didn’t know much about any of it. I certainly didn’t know that I had personal power and that I could make my own choices and that I could tell people no and that this doesn’t work for me. I come from this place of really understanding girls that don’t know and aren’t exposed and don’t even have any frame of reference for the fact that they can create the kind of life they want and the kind of birth they want.

Rebecca Dekker:

I just can’t get over your nursing professors doing that to you. You would think nurses of all people would be supportive of someone who had given birth six days ago and tell them, “You don’t have to come in.”

Laurisa Paul:

That’s not okay. Physiologically that’s not okay.

Rebecca Dekker:

Yeah.

Laurisa Paul:

Yeah. It’s really …

Rebecca Dekker:

That’s abusive.

Laurisa Paul:

Yeah, right.

Rebecca Dekker:

That’s terrible.

Laurisa Paul:

Yeah. Once I hemorrhaged, I was on the phone with a professor because I had missed either a test or a clinical or something they didn’t want me to miss, and the advice she told me was in essence, “You probably aren’t cut out for nursing school right now.”

Rebecca Dekker:

Oh my gosh.

Laurisa Paul:

It actually fueled this fire in me because remember, I had the little picture of the nurse on my wall. From the time I was a tiny girl I’ve been waiting for this and now I’m trying to integrate family into it and it was hard, but it was so brutal for me to feel like I had no support.

Rebecca Dekker:

I just can only imagine, yes, that fueled you, but how many people that would’ve just made them feel so diminished that they would just quit. I know so many people who quit midwifery school, for example, because they don’t feel supported by their school as well. When you’re juggling parenthood and school, that’s a huge commitment. The fact that they make it seem like, “Well you just can’t do it, you’re not cut out for this because you’re a mom.”

Laurisa Paul:

Right? I was so mad and I wouldn’t believe it because I’m like, “This is a profession that’s predominantly women. You cannot say that women don’t do this, that we don’t figure it out.” Because she said to me, “No one’s ever passed the first semester and had a baby at the same time. That’s two things that can’t happen together.” I don’t believe that it was true but if it was, then I was the first because I did it.

Anyway, it got better. My professors changed the second and third and fourth semester and things got better but that first one was really hard.

Rebecca Dekker:

Did you breastfeed your kids?

Laurisa Paul:

Mm-hmm.

Rebecca Dekker:

Did you pump and do all that in nursing school? How was that experience?

Laurisa Paul:

Yeah, that was also really difficult. Not a ton of support. I remember leaving class every three hours and I would go sit in the bathroom and pump just religiously. As I got further on, I got a little more confident and I would just do it there in class, just sit in the back and cover myself up and pump but that’s for a lot of years both in the workforce and in school.

Rebecca Dekker:

Yeah. What happened next? You had two children, you were in nursing school, did you graduate?

Laurisa Paul:

Yeah. I’m having all these experiences that I don’t know are fueling the woman I am now. At the time, they’re just hard and the thing I came out of nursing school with, which is really interesting, but I think my biggest takeaway from nursing school is that there’s a lot that can go wrong and we got to educate ourselves.

Well so when I was pregnant again, I know you said I have five kids, so we’re talking baby number three. When I was pregnant with him, I now was informed about all the medications that are used in birth and their side effects and everything. It just really taught me that it’s not as cut and dry as we think, meaning we can’t just medicate people without consequences. There’s stuff that has to be considered and I didn’t want medication because I was informed about it.

I was pregnant with my third, I was done with nursing school and I didn’t know where to start. I called up the girl from my class, from the back corner of my class and just asked her, “Where do I even begin?” Here I am a nurse, I’m done with school, and I still don’t really know about how to educate myself on giving birth on my own without using all the medications and all the interventions.

She was a big fan of the Bradley method. She recommended that I take the class so my husband and I did a Bradley method class. I learned a lot in that class and went to the hospital for my first unmedicated birth with my third. I was such a different person having all that knowledge and now I understood all the traditions that happen in hospitals and I understood what ones I don’t need, which was most, because I’m not a high risk person. I didn’t need all the monitoring and all the IV fluids. I show up ready for this birth.

I was just like, “This is going to be different.” I found a doctor that supported everything I wanted, which is pretty amazing now in hindsight. I’m like, “This guy said I could do what I wanted and he stood by it. He respected the things he said I could do.” I didn’t want an IV, I didn’t want continuous monitoring. I wanted to eat and drink. I wanted to be able to get in & out of the tub. I didn’t want them offering me medication. I just wanted to experience it once on my own without all the traumatic things I had of my other births.

 And we did it. We were completely grounded in that birth and we just knew that it could work how it was intended to work. We did have to do a little bit of fighting to stay within the things we wanted. They really wanted to do continuous monitoring. I just kept saying, “Call the doctor, call my doctor,” and he would say, “She doesn’t need it,” which was a huge blessing for me.

Rebecca Dekker:

You’re a nurse and your doctor was cool with you not being on the monitor continuously, but the nurses didn’t that you were off the monitor and even though your doctor had said this, they kept pushing it.

Laurisa Paul:

They kept pushing.

Rebecca Dekker:

Yeah, and I’ve seen that before with doctors who were supportive of patient autonomy and are cool with it. Sometimes they will get a lot of pushback from other hospital staff.

Laurisa Paul:

Yes.

Rebecca Dekker:

Yeah.

Laurisa Paul:

Yeah, that’s what it was. I think it was just a general fear on the part of the nurses like, “We don’t see this much, don’t women show up and have support of their doctors and know what they want and say no.” We would walk down the hall, find a little place to hide, eat our lunch, and then come back to our room because the nurse was like, “I don’t think you should be eating that.” She had a lot of fear about us doing it the way we were doing it.

Rebecca Dekker:

Which you could probably understand because you just went through all of nursing school in which you learned nothing about this.

Laurisa Paul:

Yeah.

Rebecca Dekker:

You graduated knowing nothing about unmitigated birth.

Laurisa Paul:

Yeah.

Rebecca Dekker:

Yeah.

Laurisa Paul:

Right, next to nothing. I don’t even remember it being covered. It was mostly just pharmacology and interventions and how to manage labor. I did, I had empathy for her and I was just like, “This is what we’re doing,” and I gave birth so this baby completely on my own power with next to no interventions. They did their couple vaginal checks that they wanted to do, but it blew my own mind is what it did. It blew my mind that I was capable of this without anyone’s help and that experience, I remember when he came out, just feeling the most powerful person in the world. I had so much oxytocin flowing and I was like, “I just did that. Do you guys know, I just did that? I did it on my own.” I was so proud of myself.

I remember getting up right after he was born. I wanted to go to the bathroom and just feeling my normal self, which was so different than my other births. I felt like not only my normal self, but next level normal self. I was so empowered and the nurses were still kind of afraid of me, chasing me to the bathroom like, “I don’t know if you should be getting up yet, and I don’t know who you are. We don’t know what to do with you.”

But I was so changed by that experience. It just blew my mind because I went into it with the intention of just not having medication, that was my goal. I didn’t really want that for the baby. Then I came out of it like this completely changed human being that realized birth was way bigger, way more powerful than I ever knew, and that started things rolling for me.

I actually wasn’t going into labor and delivery, even though I knew I wanted to work with babies, I hadn’t chosen that after school. I was working on a trauma unit and this experience with Rowan’s birth just really started the wheels turning where I was thinking, “Oh man. This is my field. I have to help more women experience this.”

The next time I was pregnant, it was just kind of mulling over at this time what that experience was and I was talking to everybody about it. The next time I was pregnant, I thought, “What would birth be like if I had all that goodness from my last birth but I didn’t have to do the fighting? I didn’t have to constantly be hiding and feeling like I was coming up against people who weren’t supportive.”

I started gently exploring out of hospital birth, but I was still very … I had never heard of anyone doing this. I was trained medically, I grew up in that paradigm, so I never would’ve thought I’d have a home birth. I was thinking a birth center or something that felt like a step down from a hospital. Actually I hired a birth center who had some midwives and that’s what we were going to do.

Then one morning I got up, looked at my calendar and there was an appointment on my calendar that I had forgotten about and it just said, “Kathy midwife.” I realized, “Oh man, I set up this appoint a while ago and I already have chosen midwives, but she’s coming over. This midwife was going to come over and I was going to interview her and there was no problem.”

Rebecca Dekker:

You’re pregnant with your fourth at this point?

Laurisa Paul:

Yeah.

Rebecca Dekker:

Okay.

Laurisa Paul:

Mm-hmm. I realized someone was coming over to my house for an appointment and I had no way to call her to cancel because I had already found another midwife and so I was feeling bad about it.

Rebecca Dekker:

That attends births at a hospital, so you had found a nurse midwife practice for the hospital?

Laurisa Paul:

No, I had set up lots of appointments with all different kinds of midwives and-

Rebecca Dekker:

Okay.

Laurisa Paul:

… this was a home birth midwife, but I didn’t want to do home birth.

Rebecca Dekker:

Okay, okay.

Laurisa Paul:

Yeah. I had chosen this birth center.

Rebecca Dekker:

Oh, a birth center, okay.

Laurisa Paul:

Mm-hmm. That’s where I had started it, going to my prenatals and had landed there. Because someone was coming over to my house, I just realized she’s going to come, I can’t cancel, I felt really bad that she was wasting her time and her gas because I already chosen a midwife. Well she shows up at my door, I say hello. I tell her, “I’m so sorry but I’ve chosen a different midwife. We’re going to do a birth center. Do you want to come in anyway? You drove all this way, I’m sorry,” whatever.

She came in and she said, “I would love to still meet you. It’s okay, we don’t have to proceed forward, but I would love to meet you.”

She came in and sat down on my couch and she said, “Tell me about your birth stories. I would love to know what’s happened to you up to this point.”

That was honestly one of the first times anyone had ever asked me about my birth stories, just to relay all these experiences that had happened to me. It was really, really emotional for me. I realized, oh my gosh, I’ve learned and I’ve grown so much and something happened between us that day between me and Kathy, and I realized by the end of it that I was going to have a home birth, which scared me so bad because I didn’t know the first thing about home birth, but she was supposed to come into my life and she educated me on all the evidence and the safety of home birth and the fact that I’m not a high-risk woman and that’s a good option for me if I want it. I just started exploring and learning more about home birth. That was scary for me because I was a registered nurse and I had never ever dreamed I would be giving birth at home.

We proceeded forward and I had my first home birth and it was actually a very hard birth. Of all my births, it was the hardest, just the way he was presenting and the way labor went, it was extremely hard. In the end it ended up being the biggest blessing that I had had him at home because I think if I was in another setting, they would’ve intervened a lot more. He probably would’ve been in the NICU. He had a really tight double nuchal cord and she was trying to figure out how to work with that and how to get him born because he wasn’t descending.

Anyway, everything went beautifully and she was so skilled and she knew exactly what she was doing and he was fine. I was so grateful in the end that I had the support of a midwife at home because it was scary for me. It was a birth that was scary and the fact that I didn’t have added trauma of him being taken away, of being just in a scary, dark hospital, the cold feeling of hospital. I was in my own home. She checked on me a lot because I had some postpartum depression that came up after that birth because it was so hard.

That was another pivotal learning for me that home birth was a good option for people and that there are blessings that come from home birth that we are hard to access in the hospital.

Rebecca Dekker:

People don’t think about home birth is also supposed to be in depth postpartum care in your home as well, meaning that they visit you frequently, you talk with them about everything, they see you in your natural home environment with your baby, feeding your baby. That’s a whole aspect of it. You mentioned the postpartum depression and I’ve had friends who know that they are at high risk for postpartum depression and for them that’s a really important part of their care is knowing that the home birth midwife will be checking on them in their home frequently.

Laurisa Paul:

Yes. It was for me too.

Rebecca Dekker:

Yeah.

Laurisa Paul:

100%.

Rebecca Dekker:

Yeah.

Laurisa Paul:

Having someone just touching base with me for a year after. We became great friends, so we were in touch for a long time. It also blew my mind how different that model is, that prenatally and postnatally you have a woman walking through it with you, helping you process things and listening. It was a big shock because I hadn’t experienced that model ever. Really, really healing.

Rebecca Dekker:

What happened next? You got to know Kathy really well. You’d had these four very different birth experiences.

Laurisa Paul:

Yes, very different. This is a big part of my story. When that baby was about a year old, Kathy’s kind of sister midwife that she attended births with was killed in a car accident really unexpectedly. She had so many births that she needed to attend, both hers and her friend’s clients. I had just come home from working at the hospital. I had four kids now, so I was really full. I had come home and she asked if I would be able to work as an assistant for her because her plate was full and here I was, this trained nurse, I knew a ton about birth, I could just step in and be an assistant. I had this awesome opportunity of going with Kathy to multiple home births and seeing women have this experience again and again and again and again really made an impact on me, that it wasn’t just me that felt the power of birth, it was women who are allowed to birth in their own power. They feel it and they experience it. That was a really, really cool experience. I learned a lot while I worked with her. It was maybe a year that I helped her and I got to see all kinds of things in the home birth setting.

From there, like I said, I had partially retired from hospital nursing just because I was so full with my family. I was homeschooling them and during this time I had my last … We’re fast forwarding here, but during the time I was home, I did have my last baby. She was also born at home and incredibly healing and such a powerful birth. I was working just part-time in some hospice settings and home health and had kind of stepped away from birth work for a few years and that’s just because of where life was taking me.

Then this is an interesting part of my story. I was home with my kids, birth work was, I probably hadn’t been involved for five or six years. I’d been home for a while and like I said, I was just working part-time in other settings. Then my sister-in-law went in to have a baby. She was very young, just like I was very young when I started having babies, she was much younger than me. She went in pretty uneducated, came out pretty quickly with a C-section, and I was living far away from her at that time so I wasn’t involved at all, but just being on the periphery and watching someone I loved go through this experience where she was also uneducated, she didn’t know, she went into the system, she came right out with a C-section, she wasn’t high risk. I don’t even know the details, but that experience really bothered me.

I felt like something snapped in me that day where I realized I can’t just sit here at home. I can’t just not be doing something to help change this system that I know all about now through my own experiences, through my education. I can’t just sit by blindly and watch it happen to more girls that I care about. The next generation is starting to have babies and that snapped in me that day when she had her C-section. I was wondering what I was going to do to get back into the birth field because I couldn’t do labor and delivery. It was just too far misaligned with my values at this point for me to go back in the hospital. I got an email from Evidence Based Birth® saying, “Hey, instructor applications are-“

Rebecca Dekker:

Enrollment applications? Yeah.

Laurisa Paul:

Mm-hmm. Yeah. Right at that time. I’m like, “Is this my where I should go to get back in?” I really felt like this is a cool step. I could do this and it could bring me back into the birth world working.

I did. I became an Evidence Based Birth® instructor, felt like I was coming back home to something that I knew was my work, I’d always known it was my work since I was a little girl, and loved getting back in and starting to teach.

Now that was the beginning of 2019 or was it 2020? 2020, I guess because right after I got through my training and got all ready to teach, I taught my first class and then COVID came and just shut everything down. I’m like, “Well that’s interesting.” I just got started again. I was just getting going but it was really good. It gave me time to reflect on what I have to offer and what I want to do.

While we were all shut down, I knew exactly what I wanted to do and that was I wanted to teach, but I wanted to teach girls. I felt that my call was for the next generation and helping these girls who were just like me, who just hadn’t been exposed, couldn’t make decisions because they’d never even been in the realm of someone exposing them. I wanted to teach girls. I then created the organization Girls Who Know ®and we can talk about that as much or-

Rebecca Dekker:

Yeah, tell me more about Girls Who Know®, what are you doing? What is involved in it?

Laurisa Paul:

The basic idea of Girls Who Know® is that I feel that girls first when they’re young, they have to know and love and respect their bodies. They have to be aware that their bodies are here for them and not their enemy. We live in such a body shaming culture, and so a lot of girls grow up like I did, where they feel their body is their enemy and I really like to break that paradigm. I like to just shatter it and be an example of a woman who really loves my body and has found a lot of joy and power in loving my body and honoring it.

What we do is we teach little classes for girls ages 10 to 13 all about their bodies like their anatomy and the beginning of teaching of a menstrual cycle, just planting seeds about inspiring them. My goal is to inspire girls that they are inspired by their own self. That they realize how powerful they are and that they can love who they are.

I’ve got it broken into three sections. We teach girls 10 to 13 and that’s kind of the beginning basics of loving being a girl, and then when we move into the older teenagers, 14 to 17, then I feel like we can really get into work on educating them on childbirth and their bodies. We take it to another level and I teach the physiology of birth and how it works. I have found that just teaching that inspires girls to love their bodies because it blows their minds that their bodies are so capable and so powerful and that’s really, really cool.

One time a girl said to me, “The perineum is stretchy? I did not know that skin could stretch.”

I loved when she said that because it was like, “Yes.” They hear these things. They hear about birth trauma, they hear about, a lot of girls are afraid, they’ve never even been told how it works, that it actually works. The perineum stretches. Her mind was blown that that skin stretches, she had no idea. I love blowing their minds. I love just showing them how capable they are and how wonderful their bodies are.

Then I’ve been taking it to older, 18 plus. I have a group of 18 plus and it’s just for girls who want to know what they’re going to be experiencing in the future. It’s not for pregnant girls, but what’s up with the system and what do they need to know to make informed decisions? What do they need to know about their provider and how much that’s going to influence their birth and where they choose to give birth, how much that’s going to influence their birth. That’s a really cool class too. Class for girls who are not yet pregnant but want to know, want to be informed.

Rebecca Dekker:

I think that’s so true. Some people who are listening will be like, “Well, why would they need to know this if it’s going to be years from when they’re having a baby?” Well, first of all, you don’t know that. You and I both have probably worked with pregnant teens, but also the college students I worked with, none of them who had babies but took my classes on childbirth, none of them were pregnant. They all said unanimously, “This should have been taught to us in high school. We should grow up knowing these things. Why was it hidden from us?” They did feel empowered and they loved learning about it and found it fascinating. Yeah, they all wished that it had been taught in their high schools.

Some high schools do have amazing health teachers who are able to incorporate this into their health teaching but as you know, it’s a process. You can’t learn everything in a couple weeks or in one semester or the one year that you have that health class. It’s an ongoing educational process about your body and a lot of health teachers who teach pregnancy, aside from focusing on how pregnancy happens and less about pregnancy itself, a lot of those teachers are men or they’re people who’ve had traumatic births or have never had a baby. It’s hit or miss in terms of what education they might get in high school.

Laurisa Paul:

Yes, for sure. I think it’s going to be rare that they get a teacher that’s really passionate about it and that loves to teach the evidence that’s not just teaching a medicalized birth.

You brought up a good point. I have been taking it into high schools where I can, I’ve been getting it into the classroom and I’ve had the same experience as you. These kids are so hungry for it, girls and boys alike. One thing I love about the high school setting is the boys, the exposure for all the kids to learn because they love it just as much, they haven’t been educated about the process and they love knowing.

Rebecca Dekker:

It’s like you’re pulling back this veil on something that nobody talks about, but it’s a kind of universal human experience because we’re all born.

Laurisa Paul:

Yes.

Rebecca Dekker:

Yeah.

Laurisa Paul:

Yes, it’s really, really lovely. I have some testimonials that I would love to share if …

Rebecca Dekker:

Yeah, tell us what are their words? What do they say after they get educated?

Laurisa Paul:

Last time I was in the high school, I just asked them all for some feedback and it was really moving to read the things they wrote. Cooper, so this comes from a boy, a high school boy. I said, “How has this information changed the way you see things?”

He said, “It has absolutely changed it. I have a different view on birth.”

Lucas, another boy, he said, “I didn’t know there was that much to childbirth and all I thought about was having children, that’s it. I didn’t think I could be a part of it at all.”

Marin, when I asked her, “How has this information changed the way you see things?” she said, “I know that I can say no and the most popular opinion is not always the best.”

Rebecca Dekker:

Birth is a really interesting one to teach about in terms of that old tale that everybody’s mom says to them about if your friends all jumped off a cliff, would you jump to? Actually we bring that up and laugh about it when I talk with high schoolers, because one example might be circumcision where it’s done very commonly in the US and nobody just thinks about it. I talk about, it’s just that old saying.

Laurisa Paul:

That’s so interesting.

Rebecca Dekker:

Yeah, but there’s a lot of things in pregnancy and childbirth that you could apply the same saying to.

Laurisa Paul:

Yes.

Haley says, “I have more knowledge of my possible future options on pregnancy and birth.”

Gary says, “This information has changed the way I see things and there’s other people I want you to teach.”

They’re all thinking like, “Oh man, we all need to know this.” Just like you, I’ve heard so many kids say, “I wish I would’ve known this sooner. When can you come teach my friends? I know so-and-so that’s really afraid of birth. I would love for you to talk to them.”

David who’s a boy in high school, I said, “How’s this information changed the way you see things?”

He says, I’m assuming he is talking about episiotomy. He said, “No cutting while birthing mom,” so he’s processing, okay, they’re cutting moms and we don’t have to do that. He’s processing in his own …

Rebecca Dekker:

Yeah. I think I love teaching, like you said, co-ed classes about this subject too because even the guys in the room, most of them have mothers or sisters or aunts or cousins and they’ve heard stories and they think about what happened to the people they love in their lives and they think about their future partners potentially. It’s great to plant those seeds early.

Laurisa, you won Evidence Based Birth® Pro member Challenge this year. Can you tell us a little bit about what you’ve enjoyed about being a pro member since you’ve kind of transitioned from an instructor, now you’re an alumni in that program and you’re getting your education through the pro membership? How are you using those resources?

Laurisa Paul:

I love being a pro member because for me it takes everything that’s going on in the birth world, I feel like you do all the hard work, you bring it close to me, and I can just read the direct evidence, what’s happening, how I can implement it, and how I can teach it to girls. That’s invaluable for me, that I don’t have to stay on top of it all myself but I can trust Evidence Based Birth® because I really do. I love your commitment to making things evidence-based and so I trust it. I trust what you’re saying and I use it to teach. I just translate it into language that teenagers can understand and I appreciate that, so it’s really valuable for me.

Rebecca Dekker:

That’s awesome. Yeah, that’s what we tell our members, “Take this info, go forth, use it. We want you to.”

Laurisa Paul:

Oh good ’cause that’s what I do.

Rebecca Dekker:

Yeah, go spread the information, teach other …

Laurisa Paul:

That is what I do, yes. Within my sphere of influence, I want people to know.

Rebecca Dekker:

Do you have any programs coming up with Girls Who Know® or what’s the best way for our listeners to follow you?

Laurisa Paul:

Yeah, so on girlswhoknow.com is everything you need, but if you click on classes and you find your girl’s age class or if you’re a grown girl, just click on 18 plus and you can see when the next group will be meeting. We do them virtually so you can join from anywhere. If you go to girlswhoknow.com and click on classes, then you’ll see the three different age groups and you just click on your girl’s age group or your age group if you’d like to take classes yourself and it will tell you when the next class is. If it’s already passed, then just get on the waiting list and I’ll notify you when it comes up.

Rebecca Dekker:

That’s awesome. Thank you so much, Laurisa, for all the work you were doing to take what you’ve learned and pass it on to the next generation and for being vulnerable and sharing your first stories here. I just keep thinking about that classmate of yours who is sitting in that nursing class with you, raised her hand and said something about how we can give birth without interference and how that changed your life and now you’re going out and changing other people’s lives. I love seeing that ripple effect of how we all can make a difference together.

Laurisa Paul:

Yes, thank you. That’s exactly what I want to be. I just want to be a voice that says something different that might spark something for the next generation. For me it’s important to know that I’m doing the work that I can do, this is what I can do. It’s small, but it’s meaningful to me and it will continue to work.

Rebecca Dekker:

It’s sustainable for you.

Laurisa Paul:

Yeah.

Rebecca Dekker:

Yeah.

Laurisa Paul:

Exactly.

Rebecca Dekker:

I can just feel the sense of renewal you get from working with young people, so that’s awesome.

Laurisa Paul:

I love it so much, so thank you. We’re also looking for, we’re always looking for donors, people who want to add to the scholarship fund, and that’s just on girlswhknow.com also. We would love to get eventually grants to go into high schools regularly. That’s where we’re heading.

Rebecca Dekker:

All right, listeners, thank you so much for joining us for today’s interview with Laurisa Paul, and thank you Laurisa, again for inspiring us to educate the next generation about their bodies. Thanks, everyone, we’ll see you next week. Bye.

Today’s podcast was brought to you by the Evidence Based Birth® professional membership. The free articles and podcasts we provide to the public are supported by our professional membership program at Evidence Based Birth®. Our members are professionals in the childbirth field who are committed to being change agents in their community. Professional members at EBB get access to continuing education courses with up to 23 contact hours, live monthly training sessions, an exclusive library of printer-friendly PDFs to share with your clients and a supportive community for asking questions and sharing challenges, struggles and success stories. We offer monthly and annual plans, as well as scholarships for students and for people of color. To learn more, visit ebbirth.com/membership.