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Anna Verwaal

Anna Verwaal, RN, CLE, is a maternal-child health nurse, certified lactation educator, doula, birth consultant and photographer. She received her nursing degree in her native Holland in 1984 where she was born and raised. Anna has both lived and worked, as a nurse, in cultures as diverse as Israel, Norway, Croatia, Thailand and Saudi Arabia. In 1991 she came to Los Angeles and worked for many years as a labor and delivery, post-partum and newborn nursery nurse. She also worked as a home-health nurse doing mother-baby visits learning so much more about the effects the birth experience had on the mom and baby that it compelled her stop working in hospital setting realizing people needed to be better informed about conscious conception, pregnancy and birth options long before getting pregnant.

Grateful for the profound insight and healing the years working in hospitals with moms and baby’s had given her about her own journey from being an adoptee to unaware nurse to birth advocate, she decided to change her career. Anna became a doula instead and taught workshops for birth and post-partum doula’s as well as couples ready to conceive about how our own conception, gestation and birth became the blueprint of our lives and that our cellular memory of these experiences has a profound impact on the choices we make and our physical, emotional and spiritual well being.

Currently Anna has a birth consulting service, encouraging and educating couples to make informed decisions regarding their birth choices and options. As she attended more home births, she started capturing the incredible emotional and spiritual as well as physical journey couples go through on their way to becoming parents and her sensitive birth photo’s have been used in books as well as documentaries.

Now her focus is on letting the images, of hospital-deliveries, C/sections as well as home- and water-births, speak for themselves by showing the difference in experiences and share what she has learned from being with the many baby’s who’s journey into the world she was fortunate to attend. Over the years many of the couples that came for a birth consultation, saw the photo’s and had originally planned to deliver in a hospital setting changed their minds and chose to give birth at home instead.

Realizing that a photo says more than a 1000 words Anna recently started working on a photo book that shows the way birth was intended to be; a woman’s right of passage, in her own time, in a place where she feels the safest, supported by her partner and the birth attendants she chose. With the hope that one of the things to change birthing is in showing images that will remind us of what a normal birth looks like, we will be able to return the power of childbirth to it’s rightful place.

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