Biography

Since 1987, DoulaTographer, leading edge thinker in conscious evolution, visionary and maven, Judith Elaine Halek, director of Birth Balance, has played an increasingly vital role in the dissemination of “alternative” birth information and practices through television, radio, film, websites and lectures throughout the United States and abroad. Judith has attended more than 1,000 births in homes, hospitals and birth centers and helped over 2,500 couples welcome their babies into the world. She assisted the first underwater homebirth in Manhattan, New York, the only underwater vaginal breech birth in a U.S. hospital, and the first water birth in a prominent New York City hospital.

Judith is an accomplished birth photographer, filmmaker, writer, speaker, childbirth educator, labor support doula, Dreambirth ® Imagery and Calm Birth ™ practitioner, birth counselor and waterbirth consultant, pre/postnatal fitness and body-worker. Instead of becoming a certified nurse midwife, she became a ‘media midwife’ by producing, directing, filming and airing on television, 39 documentaries on alternatives in childbirth through Manhattan Neighborhood Network in New York City.

Additional accomplishments: 19 photographs featured in the film, Orgasmic Birth, (2009) 5 photographs in the Orgasmic Birth book, (2010) self published a book/DVD, Perceptions, Reflections, Connections, (2006) featured birth photographs in numerous news media, films and websites. Judith’s photography graces the cover, Childbirth Meditation book and the Calm Birth CD, of She is the creator and developer of “Awakened Birth.” A concept that defines if you are ‘awake’ or ‘asleep’ in life, how to know the difference and what to do to make the appropriate shift.

Judith is featured in, Gig, Americans Talk About Their Jobs At The Turn Of The Millennium. Susan Faludi, of The Village Voice, reports, “The most joyous worker in the book. Judith is one of the few who seem to wear their work like a natural skin. She alone of all the chroniclers in Gig experiences her calling as connected with the life force”

Some of Judith’s clients: Elle MacPherson, Kate Winslett, Ricki Lake, Tonya Pinkins, Rachael Weisz, Maggie Gyllenhaal and Peter Sarsgaard, Maria Hinojosa, Daily Show’s, Samantha Bee and Jason Jones, Isabel Rose, Amy Stiller.

Judith devotes her time to this Social Birth Epidemic: through contagiousness, the fact that little causes can have big effects, change does not happen gradually but at one big moment i.e., a tipping point (Malcolm Gladwell) and a movement of small islands of coherence in a sea of social chaos can jump the system as the whole to a higher degree of harmony and order resulting in a Universal Humanity (Barbara Marx Hubbard).

Judith is also a proponent of giving yourself permission to let go of your anger around the birth field culture and redirect that energy toward what you would like to see as ‘positive pure potential.’