When I started my journey as a birth professional 23 years ago I never thought I would end up as a midwife. I graduated from Purdue University in 1997 and immediately began working with women and babies. I was a Labor and Delivery Nurse in El Paso, Texas for a year before we moved to Ohio. I loved working as a labor nurse, but when we moved, a position opened up in the Perinatal ICU (High-Risk Labor and Delivery) in Dayton, Ohio and I jumped at the opportunity. Working in that environment taught me how to act methodically and calmly in high-stress situations. It also taught me that there is such a difference between high risk, medicalized pregnancy care, and normal birth care. The patients that we saw were in the hospital for a very good reason, and the doctors and nurses in the hospital knew the steps to address high-risk medical issues. I began to recognize that most of the patients that I saw as a labor and delivery nurse were not high-risk patients, but the hospital system treated them very similarly to my ICU patients. When I became pregnant with my second child, I began searching for an alternative to the traditional hospital OB care. In 1990 I gave birth to my second child with a Certified Nurse Midwife and my life was changed. The differences between how I was listened to and cared for was striking. With my CNM, I felt empowered to make decisions about my care, and I felt like I had agency over my own body and birth experiences. I decided at that point that I would begin to pursue midwifery as a career.
In 2002 I was accepted to the University of New Mexico’s Nurse-Midwifery graduate school. I earned my Masters of Nursing in 2004 and began catching babies as a CNM that year. I worked for 13 years as a CNM in hospitals and clinics and helped to bring over 1200 new babies into the world. During this time, I could not shake this nagging feeling that as a CNM in a traditional medical setting I was not living into the values I had around women’s healthcare. The restraints of institutionalized healthcare forced me, as a midwife, to behave like a physician treating sick patients. My birth patients weren’t sick, they were pregnant! I wanted pregnant people to have a say in their care, I wanted 60 min appointments where my clients could really get comfortable with me, I wanted to have time in my day so that new parents could stop by and see me easily if they had questions, and I wanted women to truly feel empowered by their healthcare. This just really wasn’t possible in most clinics and hospitals. So, in 2017 I began planning and building Empowered Pregnancy. We opened in 2019 and for the first time in my career, I feel like I am providing people with care that is humane, safe, and client-centered. I am so excited that you are considering Empowered Pregnancy for your care and look forward to working WITH you to create the empowering health care experience you deserve.