I am actively resisting the urge to badge this story. fuck'n LA, man. That birth plan you linked is also phenomenal. I have a friend who's thinking of becoming a doula, and while I don't intend to discourage her, I'm tempted to send it to her just to give a bit of a warning.
I mean, look. It's easy enough to be trained as a doula that there's a joke about it in Archer. Which is amazing, by the way. Season 5 is bomb. It's also a high-attrition profession. My wife has a really good friend who has made her (meager) living as a doula for probably 15 years? She's quite disparaging of "shade tree doulas", IE, those without certification who "doula" like twice a year for a year and a half and then tell everyone about how they used to be a doula. Said friend runs a "doula collective" whereby you sign up and one of three women are at your beck and call f'n forever because that, my friend, is why my wife is a midwife and not a doula, not because the pay is better because fuckin' hell my cousin was a doula for like 3 years in Santa Monica and made like $1800 per birth but because as a midwife you don't have to show up until the woman is in active labor and once the baby is delivered, you leave. Said "doula collective" has had 15 babies in the past 16 days which basically means ass-kissing entitled women at their absolute worst for 36 hours at a stretch, five times in the past two weeks, times three different women who are all examining their life choices. There's this awesome schtick called "post-partum doula" which is basically "get paid to show up at a rich person's house, cook, and take care of a baby when it's spending 90% of its time asleep." We recommend them wholeheartedly because frankly every expectant mother who doesn't have a clue what she's doing and is freaked out about it just needs someone to copy for a few days while she figures her shit out and post-partum doulas are all about that. Those? there are a lot less of them, they make a lot more money, and they do that job into their goddamn 70s because it requires a modicum of medical training, an affinity for newborns, and a desire to perform light housekeeping for roughly 6x the going rate. We based our LA recommendations on what sort of cuisine they specialized in. There's one down there that my wife is still in awe of who basically shows up and loads you up with a couple weeks of baked goods. I think "be a doula for a while" is something plenty of women do, as is "decide being a doula is too much work." I think if she can get over the 'must be in the room when the magic happens' angle of things she could very well be set for life.