Welcome to the Free Birth Podcast, a supportive space for people who are learning,

exploring and celebrating their autonomous choices in childbirth.

Together, we'll unpack truths, share personal stories,

and claim our ability to birth freely and intuitively. Here's your host, Emily Sal day. Today on the show I have the brilliant Yolanda Clark from New Brunswick, Canada.

Yolanda is a traditional birth attendant, a writer, an educator of autonomous birth.

We dive into the controversial topic of ultrasound,

a subject Yolanda has spent the last 18 years researching.

We discuss what they are, the studies, the social impact,

risks versus benefits, and of course, we share our many opinions. I do have a personal relationship to ultrasound so that's that that's informed

my attitude and and my perspective on it since the beginning.

And actually, and this is something that I talk about in the podcast that I'm just about

to release or that I will have already released by the time that anyone listens to this.

It actually starts before I was pregnant with my mother.

And my mom was pregnant with my little brother when I was eight, so there's eight years between us.

And I remember very distinctly my mom coming home from one of her prenatal appointments, and she did things,

you know, the conventional way.

She had doctors and hospital births. and she had

came home and said that she had an she had been offered this thing called an ultrasound by her doctor.

And she'd never heard of it before, it had never come up before. This was still in the

80s, late 80s, but I was born in 81 and this is the first time she'd ever encountered the term and the doctor had offered her this ultrasound because she was so old she was 39 years old and this was way before ultrasound was really fully in the mainstream.

It wasn't a standard of care.

It was just offered to women who had serious issues like advanced age.

...