Roxane was a key part of my beautiful and successful birth with my first child. Over the course of the 6 months we worked together, she built up my trust in her and enabled me to follow my instincts. I truly believe this is what allowed me to birth without fear. Her knowledge and pain management techniques in preparing for childbirth and during labor + childbirth helped me achieve these ends. Throughout the pregnancy and labor, she provided guidance and coaching that let me "tap into my mom's intuition." In addition to the standard in-person meetings that were part of her services, she was always responsive to my questions. The phone calls, texts and emails we had in between meetings got rid of any fear or lingering doubts I was having about giving birth. My birth experience went really well; on my due date, my water broke, and I had about 6 hours of labor and no pain medication during labor. Having Roxane alongside me during labor meant that I didn't even miss medication - circular breathing, movement and massage allowed the time to go by quickly. She helped me to labor at home and, when my contractions were finally close & intense enough, we went to the birthing center where I almost immediately went to the birthing room to start pushing. Our son was born 45 minutes later. I didn't tear and was also able to have delayed cord clamping, like we had wanted. I could not have asked for a better birth experience and way to welcome my baby into the world. Thank you Roxane! read more

Roxane Thompson Doula - Doulas Near Me - San Francisco, California

I was able to have a beautiful birth, which was a VBAC, because of my wonderful doula Roxane. She was so knowledgable, calming and competent, I felt completely taken care of but at the same time empowered to make the right choices. My birth took almost 2 days, Roxane came in at the right time about 12 hours before birth, helped me go through contractions at home for about 5 hours and helping make the decision to go to the hospital and provided all the support that my partner and I needed. I am so so happy that I met Roxane in such a short amount of time before giving birth but she helped me rewrite the story of my previous traumatic cesarian birth (I didn't have doula support at the time). I cannot recommend Roxane enough, she is the professional by your side who is also your advocate and your family away from family in the delivery room. Reading through other people's comments, I see that my experience is very similar to other commenters. Thank you Roxane for being our doula :-) read more

I am so grateful to Roxane for being my doula and supporting me throughout my birth journey. Roxane is pure positive energy and she has an incredibly calming and peaceful persona. She is very experienced and has been a doula in 500+ births. She was also my sister's doula the year before. Roxane helped me navigate many difficult choices and reassured me when I felt very anxious or disappointed. I had big hopes of attempting an unmedicated vaginal delivery but due to unforeseen circumstances and complications ended up delivering through scheduled c section. Roxane empowered me to advocate for my choices and as a result was able to join us in the operating room. She was absolutely essential there, able to support, guide, and comfort me and my partner through the scary and unknown. I felt completely safe and confident and quite literally shed tears of joy during my son's birth. read more

Our experience with Roxanne was great. She was very warm and understanding throughout the process. This was our second child and my wife's goal was to get a VBAC without an epidural and Roxanne made it possible for her to realize her goals. Roxanne was incredibly helpful during the laboring at home and provided crucial support during the ride to the hospital. My wife delivered just over 20 mins after we got to the hospital and we were able to do skin to skin with our precious baby girl! Would definitely recommend Roxanne as a doula if it's your first one or you already have children. read more

Roxane is everything I looked and hoped for in a Doula. She's warm, kind, motherly, intuitive and so so wise. She felt like family to me from our first conversation, which was so important to me as someone who's family is abroad and couldn't make it to my birth. She provided my husband and I with the education and confidence we needed to have the natural hospital birth we envisioned. I ended up having a very short labor and baby arrived just 30 minutes after we made it to the hospital, so Roxane didn't make it to his actual birth. Nonetheless, I wouldn't have changed a thing about our work together or my birth experience and would have chosen to work with Roxane a million times over, even knowing this. Knowing that she would be by my side and on my team as an advocate and encourager during labor calmed my spirits and body which I believe influenced the positive and short birth experience I had. I look forward to working with Roxane again in the future and highly recommend her as a birth team member and advocate. Thank you Roxane!!! read more

Roxane Thompson Doula - Roxane with our baby and doggie (who adores her!) at her feet. - Doulas Near Me - San Francisco, California

Bringing Roxane on our birth journey was the best decision I could have made. I wanted to hire a doula because I knew having an advocate who could help with pain management, questions, and talking us through options if necessary during labor would be very helpful for us as first time parents. Doulas know tricks to better prepare the body for labor and reduce tears and recovery time as well. Roxane was warm, knowledgable, well-researched, and communicative throughout the whole process. She also can help cut through the noise/fears that come with pregnancy, birth, and newborn stages. When I started labor, my husband began texting her at 4:00 in the morning once my contractions were closer together and she was communicative even then! As my labor became more intense, my husband called the hospital and they told him they were on divert, and that we had to go to Santa Rosa (!!!!) for my delivery (we live in Daly City). My contractions were 4 minutes apart at that point, and I completely devolved into a full panic. Roxane came to our home at that point and helped him navigate so we were able to get in to our hospital in SF without issue, and helped me return to calm focused breathing necessary for labor. From there she was an essential champion to helping us deliver a healthy baby girl, and she provided excellent postpartum resources as well. We are so grateful to her for making our birth experience amazing and I can't recommend her enough. read more

Roxane was the guardian angel we didn't know we needed! For our first birth, my husband and I decided it would be helpful to look into a birth doula. We didn't know much about doulas but we knew that we could definitely benefit from having an additional support person who wasn't a family member who could advocate for us and put our minds at ease should any challenges arise. Early in my third trimester I conducted several interviews to try to find the perfect doula for us. During just the first few minutes of our first call with Roxane, she immediately helped put me at ease -- she gave me an early glimpse of what our whole birth journey would be like together. Second to the delivery, our time laboring at home was one of the most special parts of my entire birth experience. Thanks to Roxanne, I was able to labor at home until I was dilated to 6cm. We specifically labored with me in the bathtub for almost 4 hours. When Roxane first arrived, I thought I was at an 8/10 with the pain. However, I was still quite far from active labor and Roxane stayed by our side and guided us through each and every contraction for several hours. The instruction she provided to my husband to reduce the pain of each active labor contraction helped TREMENDOUSLY. I don't think I would've gotten as far as I did without those movements she taught us. With Roxane's help I also went from being panicked and scared about hours of painful contractions to being able to power through every contraction with so much strength and confidence. While at the hospital, Roxane continued to help us feel empowered. Roxane interacted so well with the nurses in labor and delivery. Given that there were a few different nurses coming in and out only as needed, we were so grateful for Roxane's constant presence and care. I ultimately got an epidural that slowed my contractions down a bit. We were recommended to use Pitocin to help move things along. However, we instead were able to try a few different laboring positions that Roxane requested to the nurses and doctor that we try. As a result, it quickly helped get baby in a good place and me to 10cm! The rest of the birth went smoothly and I felt so empowered through the whole process. We likely would have been significantly more nervous and anxious through each phase of our son's birth were it not for Roxane. She's become like family to us and we wouldn't want anyone else by our side for when we start preparing for baby #2:) read more

I want to begin by saying that this review is not written with vindictiveness but instead out of a concern for other women who might choose to hire Roxane to be their birth doula. I have several complaints about my experience with her, but my biggest complaint of all is that when I wrote to Roxane several weeks after I gave birth, voicing some of my concerns, she chose not to respond to my email at all. She ghosted me--someone who was present in one of the most intimate moments of my life. If this not contrary to the spirit of who a birth doula is, I'm not sure what is. Roxane has lots of positive reviews, but my experience with her was far from positive. To make a long story short, my baby--my second child--was born on the steps outside of the hospital. My birth story, on the whole, was beautiful, but I believe that Roxane's feedback and participation contributed significantly to the less-than-ideal parts of it. On the day that I gave birth, when I told her I was feeling painful contractions, she stopped by briefly, which I appreciated. But in her visit, she never once asked me what, exactly, I was feeling, instead eyeballing my stomach and concluding that the baby was way too high to be born any time soon. She said discouragingly that I was feeling symptoms that I was "supposed to be feeling" much earlier, in week 39 (I was 40 weeks and a few days, by this point). She laughingly chalked up my feelings to oily food that I had eaten the night before. On the whole, her stance was to make light of what I was feeling and not take the time to probe the extent of my pain, to ask what I was feeling, to listen to me. Later in the day, the contractions began to get more intense, and we communicated this to her over text. Even though this was my second labor--when labor is notoriously fast--she did not make an effort to understand what was going on, instead suggesting quickly to get in the tub or to use the electric massage unit she had left us. She sent encouraging remarks and emoticons over text, but never tried calling. When I called her to say that it was time to go to the hospital, she suggested that I go to triage first, to see how much I was dilated, and then to call her. When I finally got ahold of my doctor, she told me to immediately go to the hospital. Minutes later, I was in the car, screaming, feeling my baby's head, and in active labor. I won't get into the details of this experience, but suffice it to say that it was terrifying. In Roxane's defense, my labor was quite fast. But my criticism is that Roxane could have made more of an effort to understand my feelings and to be present even when it was uncertain how far along I was, especially given that second births are often fast. My sense is that Roxane presumed that I was nowhere near having the baby based on her assessment from earlier in the day and didn't want to get stuck at home or at the hospital with a woman still in the very early stages of labor. She wanted to avoid the extra work. I want to be careful not to assume the worst of Roxane, but I also want to be honest about my experience and my feelings coming out of working with her. It felt, in the end, like my labor was made into a transaction. She was concerned, as any good business woman, with providing a service in which she made maximum profit with minimum expenditure. And there were other moments when I felt that this was a business transaction--her sporting the doula "brand" almost ostentatiously, using the jargon of a stereotypical doula (references to "mom's intuition," "birth journeys"), her giving me a "gift" of a free session with a lactation consultant after birth (I would, of course, pay for additional sessions), her boasting to this lactation consultant about how quick my labor was and how it was the exercises that she recommended that no doubt led to this outcome. And in the end, her not responding to my email, perhaps because it was outside of her contractual duties. Giving birth to a new life is a sacred experience, and in the end, I felt this sacredness. His birth was beautiful--we arrived at the hospital just in time, and we were immediately surrounded by doctors and nurses who made sure he was safe. I was hoping that my doula would contribute to this experience, but Roxane, in the end, did not. Even in the labor and delivery room, after I gave birth, she didn't seem to be in tune with the sacredness of the event in which she was participating. She made critical remarks about the doctor, and she said that she had never seen a nurse massage a uterus with such force. She was adversarial during moments that should have been peaceful. I felt that peace, but Roxane didn't belong there, in those peaceful moments. And I write this review out of concern for other mothers who may be thinking of hiring Roxane to be their doula, and who are seeking a reliable source of support, comfort, and love during these seminal moments. For me, Roxane provided none of these things. read more

I am a 37 year old first time mom who gave birth at UCSF Mission Bay. I really wanted a vaginal birth with epidural but no other medication if I could help it. Roxane helped me achieve that goal and more. Roxane has a magically calming presence and loving spirit on top of her epic experience as a mother, grandmother, and doula over so many years. She is incredibly knowledgeable regarding childbirth and how to manage the ups and downs of the third trimester, delivery, and post partum. She is a keen navigator of the Bay Area hospital system and knows how to encourage you to advocate for yourself in the face of (what I experienced as) less helpful medical professionals. For example, I had a distressing third trimester check in when a doctor just threw sound bites of information at me about induction and made me feel like it was imminent. Afterward, when I texted Roxane in distress, she took the time to patiently tutor me on an hour long phone call on what my options were. We made a solid plan for what we would do if the baby didn't come "on time" and that really calmed me. In a twist of fate, my son arrived a week early. I skipped passive labor and went immediately into active labor at home (8cm dilated by time we got to the hospital). My husband was in shock (and I was not communicating in normal words!). He immediately called Roxane since, after just an hour of contractions, the app was telling us to go to the hospital. Roxane steadied his nerves and showed up right away based on her intuition. The relief on my part and my husband's was palpable. We rode to the hospital together at 1am with Roxane backseat driving urging my husband to go faster, faster! She leaped out of the car when we arrived and had to seriously HUSTLE to get a wheelchair. Her energy that night and into the morning was on fire. She was by my side with no breaks for 12+ hours. Massaging my feet, giving me aromatherapy while I was taking breaks from pushing, applying oil to prevent tears, encouraging me with soft words, suggesting that I change positions to push more effectively, giving my husband tips on how to assist, cleaning me up when the nurses weren't attentive enough... the list goes on. I emerged from four hours of pushing only with one tiny tear that has fully healed by week six. According to my husband who witnessed it all, "Roxane made all the difference". Roxane is a force of nature and cares passionately about her beautiful moms (as she calls us). Being a doula is in her blood. If you work with her, you (and your partner) will be forever grateful for her tireless energy and care. read more

We reached out to Roxane in preparation for the first birth of our baby. We wished to have an experienced doula who could provide emotional support for both my husband and I, and someone who would guide us through the different stages of labor. Roxane was able to do both of those and more for us. She has a well thought out pre-birth plan that was educational. During those sessions she was patient and spent the appropriate amount of time with us to ensure our questions were answered and needs were met. When it came to labor, my husband and I can not imagine what the experience without Roxane would have been. Roxane commanded the room, guiding me through the full process. She was the eyes and ears that we didn't know we needed and was always looking out for all of us! Some nurses already fondly knew Roxane, another asked us if she was our doula, commenting "they are never as respectful to us nurses as she is." My OBGYN even asked Roxane for her business cards!! We are beyond grateful to Roxane and all she did to enable the safe delivery of our newborn! read more

Roxane helped my wife and me through the birth of our first child. She was wonderful in coaching my wife before and during labor, and checking on us after our daughter was born. We're grateful for her upbeat positive energy, patience, compassion, and wisdom. My wife wanted to give birth without the help of pain medications, if possible. Roxane taught her what she could expect, tips to help my wife get through labor pains, and how to navigate decisions presented by the hospital staff. In particular, we found Roxane's vast experience with helping many mothers and her up-to-date healthcare knowledge to be invaluable. And during my wife's active labor, Roxane helped to comfort and coach her through the most painful moments. Even though the hospital staff was wonderful, we were thankful to have Roxane with us through our birth journey. We would highly recommend her to any expecting parents! read more

I am writing this as a husband and father of a new born wonderful baby daughter, Aylin :) Roxane was an amazing support for us from day one. She is super kind, caring, and full of love. She was a part of our family, our team leader giving us the best guidance at the most challenging times. Having her in this journey, trusting her experience and guidance gave us an amazing confidence and eliminated the stress out of the equation. We had the best decision making with her help through out this journey and cried all together with happiness when my wife gave an amazing v-back birth to our second child. I can't find words to emphasize how important she was for us. We feel so lucky to have her and thank her so much for everything. read more

Roxane was such an important and amazing part of my first childbirth experience. She is so loving and skillful, and is a confident and extremely capable guide. The pre-natal sessions helped us feel ready for what to expect, and then when it was go-time, she was right there with us, fully supportive of our vision. My goal was to labor at home for as long as possible before going to the hospital, which was exactly what happened. And, she was very open and flexible (never any judgment about how the process should go.) She was masterful at helping me remember my breath, even during the most intense parts of labor. She helped my husband by more at ease and gave him practical tips (how to squeeze my hips to help with the pain!) and she was great at working alongside the midwives and nurses in the hospital. I'd highly recommend Roxane to all expecting families! read more

It was a joy to work with Roxane in my birth process. She was a great listener, a wonderful advocate, and a translator extraordinaire for all things medical and birth-related during the entire journey. She was also a huge support to my husband in feeling prepared, and in navigating the wild unknown of labor and delivery at home and in the hospital. When we were first looking for a doula, we met with a number of people and Roxane immediately stood out as both loving and full of wisdom and practical expertise. She was exactly what we hoped for, and what we needed! read more

Roxane supported me through the births of both my children. I knew I was in good hands after the first time I met with her. Roxane immediately struck me as positive, understanding, and experienced and I felt comfortable with her right away. Having her as an advocate and guide throughout my first birth made a huge difference, so much so that I knew I wanted her support again when I got pregnant for my second child. She helped my husband and me feel prepared for unknowns and supported through our decisions. She also maintained and encouraged strong communication and cared deeply about my birth vision. Roxane gracefully helped us to navigate each unique birth and my husband and I are so grateful to her. read more

Roxane was wonderful to work with for the birth of our second child. She was there for us throughout the entire process to help us navigate any curveballs that came our way, make sound decisions we were comfortable with and trust our instincts. We really appreciated her unwavering positive attitude, depth of knowledge (particularly about VBAC births) and how she educated us about our options. With her support, we were truly able to have the birth we were hoping for. We couldn't be more grateful to have her support on this journey and we could not recommend her highly enough!! read more

If you're looking for a doula who will go above and beyond - Roxane is the partner for you! I can't speak highly enough about her - she was a critical part of our birth team and feels like family. I interviewed a couple of doulas and her energy aligned best with my own birth vision -- she put me at ease and helped create a calm, well informed prenatal prep period & birth experience for me & my husband. She is very experienced and gave us valuable tips and tricks throughout our meetings. She had great rapport with the doctors and nurses at CPMC and was by our side throughout birth, empowering my husband to take the lead as my partner but playing a supporting role that made us both more confident. This was my first birth and it ended up being a scheduled c-section, but we planned for various scenarios in advance and felt comfortable thanks to Roxane's encouragement. She is always learning and bringing new ideas. We are so grateful she was in the room with us and we look forward to keeping in touch as our child grows! read more

We are an international couple and we welcomed our first child in March (2020). Roxane is knowledgeable, kind and empowering and has been an absolutely wonderful doula to us. Throughout the prenatal time and of course during labor and birth Roxane has been part of our family. As a first time parent her support has been invaluable and made me and my husband we feel strong and empowered. We were in the hospital for 2.5 days and Roxane was at our side every second of it. Ultimately I had a really positive birth experience for which I am thankful. What struck me is how much Roxane cares for the families she works with, she went above and beyond to help us. In fact we are still in touch and she feels like family to us! We are very grateful to her and can highly recommend Roxane to any moms & dads to be! read more