I’m so happy you’re here! My name is Margaret Wilkins and Im a 32 year old birth worker and photographer, living in Central Illinois.

I have been a birth and postpartum Doula since 2019 and have more recently brought my love of photography into my business as well. I moved to Bloomington in 2022 from Chicago, where I spent most of my twenties, to finally be with my long distance boyfriend. I have since met many amazing people within the birth community here working at the Birth Center of Bloomington Normal as their Patient Care Coordinator and Childbirth Educator. I feel so lucky to be a part of such an amazing and important establishment and I LOVE attending births there!

I more recently gave birth to my first baby in late 2023 and boy was it a life changing experience! I planned on delivering at the Birth Center but life had other plans for me. I truly believe that my long, chaotic, and unpredictable labor taught me so much in terms of preparing for any situation and being able to support my clients no matter the circumstances.

In my free time, I love gardening, traveling, antiquing, and watching old movies. If you’d like to know more about my path to becoming a birth worker, keep reading!

I have always been deeply fascinated with babies, birth, and the pregnant body. From a young age, I remember admiring pregnant women from afar thinking how beautiful they all looked. This fascination stuck with me but never evolved into anything other than that. I studied Apparel Merchandising and marketing in college and thought that a career in fashion was my calling. Boy was I wrong! 

My early twenties were a period of trial and error. I worked in the industry that I had planned on for about 3 years and slowly came to the realization that I was extremely unfulfilled in my career and in turn, my life. 

In 2017 I started volunteering for an organization in Chicago, that supports survivors of sexual assault. It was my first real experience with advocacy and it opened my eyes to how important and necessary this kind of work is. It is inevitably what led me to my calling as a birth worker, and I will always cherish the knowledge shared with me and the experience I had there.

The first time that I heard the term “doula” and learned about what it entailed, I remember so vividly, it was like a lightbulb turned on in my head. I dove in, researching the doula path the next few weeks and became more and more certain that this was the perfect path for me.  Being a Doula is a culmination of everything I love and feel passionate about! Babies, birth, the magic of the female body, supporting women, advocacy, the list got on. Over 4 years later and I feel even stronger about how important and necessary this work is. In 2019 I attended a doula workshop in Oahu where I learned hands on about birth, postpartum, and lactation. I trained with Maternity Wise International, an amazing organization that I am so happy to be a part of.

I feel so lucky to have discovered birth work and to be making a career out of it, and I will bring that passion to each and every one of my clients births. I feel immensely grateful and honored every time a client invites me into this beautifully intimate experience and I cherish each and every moment wholeheartedly. If you choose to work with me I will make sure to bring my knowledge and experience as well as my warmth and empathy into each and every experience that we have together.

I look forward to hearing from you!