Kandice Elliott, Doula

About Kandice Elliott

If you live in the Greater Lansing area and you are here to look for a doula for your current birth, then congratulations!

If you are here looking for what a doula is, then I’ll explain.

The word doula comes from the Greek word “doulos,” which simply means someone who serves another. (It is used 141 times in New Testament!) As we are called to serve others, many have taken on this term to specifically serve pregnant woman around their time of birth. This is what I’m called to do, too.

But you should know a little about me first, so here is my story and introduction to the world of birth:

I grew up in a bigger family—the fifth child of seven—and I had the blessing of my toes being dipped into the metaphorical waters of natural birth without even realizing it. My mother (Anne Elliott) birthed four out of her seven children out of the hospital, and I was born unassisted, while my younger sister was born with the help of a wonderful midwife.

As I was growing up, these experiences led me to the mindset that having birth at home was a normal thing that people did, though I still had the mindset that it was also normal to have birth in a hospital, and my mind held a lot of misconceptions about birth, such as women laboring and giving birth on their backs was also normal. It wasn’t until 2020 that it occurred to me that the modern mindset about “normal” birth wasn’t as healthy as it could be.

I began to grow interested in childbirth, especially as the circle of other birth workers (doulas, midwives, and childbirth educators) around me grew, and I realized birth work was something I could become a part of. I began reading textbooks on midwifery from my mother’s bookshelf in my spare time. After graduating high school, I began taking classes to make birth work a real possibility.

I had weekly calls with a midwife friend of mine for a while, and then I started Christian Childbirth Education and Doula Certification course training in 2024 through Hartland College. In the fall of the same year I began to work on my Bachelor’s degree in midwifery through Mercy College of Midwifery. My goal is to become a Certified Professional Midwife.

To this day, I believe birth is a God-designed process that has been hurt by life in a broken world. I believe it is a great goal to try to have as natural a birth as possible. That goal has been proven to be easier to achieve when mothers are given a steady support system. This is why I strive to learn as much about the process of preparing for childbirth and a healthy postpartum period—to support and teach women and their families how they can have the best possible birth.