About Me

Laurel Ripple Carpenter, CD(DONA), PES, is a mother, an activist, a doula, and an advocate.  She’s mama to the fiestiest red-headed toddler ever, and farmstress at the Circle A Farm in Colorado.  She’s currently finishing her BA in the Anthropology of Reproduction, and is conducting an ethnographic study of the full spectrum doula movement.

She is founder of the Full Spectrum Doula Network, an online community “supporting the full spectrum of pregnancy choices, and the full spectrum of doulas.”  She also founded The Doula Partnership, which provides free & low-cost doula services & childbirth education to low-income women in Western Colorado.  She publishes the CUNTastic Zine and the CUNTastic Blog, each of which is part personal, part educational, and all political.  She operates Two Rivers Birth Services as a Certified Doula through DONA International and a certified Placenta Encapsulation Specialist through PBi.  Contact her at laurel@cuntastic.org.

Her articles include:

• Multiple photos in the Mama Calendar, January 2012
• “3 Acres of Food & Family,” HipMama #50, October 2011
• “We Are Not All Women: Midwives, Doulas, and the Gender of Birth Work,” SQUAT Birth Journal #5, Summer 2011
• “Interview with Robbie Davis-Floyd,” SQUAT Birth Journal #4, Spring 2011
• “On Radical Childcare,” Building Blocs Zine: parenting, movement and little folk, Spring 2011
• “Body Pirate: How My Body was Taken Over by a Nursing Toddler,”Outlaw Midwives #2, January 2011
• “Placenta Medicine,” SQUAT: An Anarchist Birth Journal #3, Winter 2010
• “Black Diaper 101: What We Do Differently,” CUNTastic Zine #3, Summer 2010
• “Raising Hell with my Identity,” Mamaphiles Zine #4, January 2010
• “Lost My Mucus Plug at the DNC,” CUNTastic Zine #2, December 2009
• “Swollen: Moments from a Pregnancy,” CUNTastic Zine #1, June 2009
• Radioactive: Western Colorado and U.S. Nuclear History, Confluence Media Collective, 2009
• “The Crisis of Crisis Pregnancy Centers,” Clamor Magazine, Spring 2006
• “Reproductive Self-Care: Menstrual Extraction,” Clamor Magazine, Winter 2005
• “Suction Yer Own Cunt,” Slingshot #86, May/June 2005

Upcoming articles include:

• The Sex Play Issue, CUNTastic Zine #4, Summer 2011
• The Married Anarchist, 2012-2013