Filling a gap in maternity care: The caring dilemma in doula practice
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Doulas are non‐medical support persons, paid for privatively by clients, who offer emotional support during pregnancy and childbirth. While doulas work alongside clinical care providers, such as physicians, midwives, and nurses, they are unregulated and typically have no formal standing in hospitals. As with other types of care work, doula practice is shaped by gendered assumptions about women's “natural” and boundless capacity to provide care. In this paper, I draw on interviews with 26 doulas practicing in Toronto, Canada, to explore the nature of doulas' caring dilemma―the tension between an altruistic motivation to provide care and a desire for greater professional autonomy and control over working conditions among care workers. I show that doulas' self‐imposed obligation to provide a specific model of care, along with their desire to fill gaps in maternity care, results in a caring dilemma that places their own needs in opposition to those of their clients. In response to their significant caring demands, some doulas attempt to alter their work to improve their working conditions.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.007 | 0.008 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.021 | 0.028 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.008 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".