Pregnant prisoners have health-care needs that are minimally met by prison systems. Many of these mothers have high-risk pregnancies due to the economic and social problems that led them to be incarcerated: poverty, lack of education, inadequate health care, and substance abuse. Lamaze educators and doulas have the opportunity to replicate model programs that provide these women and their children with support, information, and empowering affirmation that improve parenting outcomes and decrease recidivism.

This updated edition of Care Practice Paper #3 presents the evidence for the benefits of continuous support in labor. The role of the doula is explained. Women are encouraged to plan for continuous support during labor and to consider including a woman experienced with childbirth among their labor support team.

All women should be allowed and encouraged to bring a loved one, friend, or doula to their birth without financial or cultural barriers. Continuous labor support offers benefits to mothers and their babies with no known harm. This article is an updated evidence-based review of the "Lamaze International Care Practices that Promote Normal Birth, Care Practice #3: Continuous Labor Support," published in The Journal of Perinatal Education, 16(3), 2007.

One factor explaining why women choose unnecessary high-tech births is their lack of knowledge of the research. Presenting research in Lamaze class can be difficult; however, teaching tools described in this article may help facilitate evidence-based discussions. The recently published Journal of Perinatal Education supplement issue written by the Coalition for Improving Maternity Services Expert Work Group gives Lamaze educators a rich resource to pass along to expectant parents.

The assumptions on which educators based childbirth education principles were valid when psychoprophylactic birth became available. Yet, educators and health-care providers have changed their assumptions about birth as they have learned more from the midwifery model of care, how women want to give birth, and how capable the body is to give birth. Educators' teaching must now emphasize the synchrony of hormones that facilitates birth, the Sphincter Law, and the sharing of woman-to-woman stories throughout the generations if birth is to be set in its rightful place-in the hands of the mothers.