I began my midwifery career working in a hospital where I was lucky if I had 15 minutes to spend with each patient during an office visit. The majority of my time was spent charting notes as opposed to being with a woman during her labor. The hospital setting, with all the unnecessary interventions and cookie-cutter treatments truly went against the grain for me.

I'm thrilled to have been asked to join the Brooklyn Birthing Center (BBC), where I am free to practice midwifery the way I believe it should be done – as individualized as each woman and each labor is. At the BBC I have the opportunity to form relationships with our patients and their families; spend quality time addressing their concerns; and ultimately to share in their labor experience as more than just a provider, but as someone with a deep connection and caring for the women I have shared a nine month journey with."

Barri is celebrating more than two decades of attending deliveries. She apprenticed in a high volume home birth practice over five years and then obtained her nursing degrees at the University of San Francisco and her MS and CNM at the University of California San Francisco. After graduating, she worked at the Stanford University Midwifery Practice and then moved back home to New York City and worked at Bellevue Hospital. With children grown, she then had the opportunity to live for a year in Indonesia, three months of which was spent volunteering at Bumi Sehat, a birth center in Bali. Barri returned to work in a private practice and now, with the closure of St Vincent's Hospital, was very grateful to see it timed with an opening at the Brooklyn Birthing Center.

James Ducey, M.D. is a board certified OB/GYN and Perinatologist (hi risk specialist) in charge of the Labor and Delivery Unit at Staten Island University Hospital (SIUH) as well as its Women's Center. He is an invaluable resource for us. He reviews our charts to insure that all is up to speed. In the very rare event that a woman develops a serious complication and his hospital is convenient for her, we may transfer her care to him.

An interesting factoid about Dr. Ducey: he will not permit any attending OB at SIUH to perform a primary elective cesarean section. He is convinced of what is already becoming apparent – that the maternal mortality rate in the U.S. (while low) is on the rise because of the dramatic increase in cesarean sections.

Sol Neuhoff, M.D. is a board certified OB/GYN with a practice in Brooklyn. He most often attends our births when we (the midwives) need his expertise and, boy, are we glad. Aside from having skills no longer being taught…aside from being an eminently fine human being, he is the least interventionist physician that any of us has ever worked with. Clearly, when we need him, it is because we require an intervention of some sort. However, we have often seen him go out of his way to avoid a cesarean section if the circumstances allow.

Norma Veridiano, M.D. is a board certified OB/GYN. Though she has retired from the practice of Obstetrics (a great loss for women in general and for us specifically) she remains a terrific resource for those of our clients in need of gynecological follow-up (of those conditions not within the purview of midwives). Her office is downstairs from the birth center.

Alexis has been a part of the Brooklyn Birthing Center team since 2006. Before becoming our child birth educator, she functioned as both a volunteer in our office and as a birthing assistant. Alexis is currently a registered nurse in Labor and Delivery at Stony Brook University Hospital on Long Island. Alexis received both her bachelor’s in Social Welfare in 2006 and bachelor’s in Nursing in 2009 from Stony Brook University. She hopes to continue down the path of inspiring and educating women to have natural births and to one day become a nurse midwife herself.

Kate has been a birth assistant since March of 2008. She is also a DONA trained doula and hopes to eventually become a midwife. Kate believes that birth is a rite of passage- powerful, beautiful and intense. She maintains a true commitment to supporting and nurturing all women in their birth experiences with compassion and positive energy. Though Kate continues to work as a Birth Assistant, she has now joined our staff as a Midwife Assistant, a position for which she is more than competent.

Katherine was drawn into the birth community while living in Ghana where she guided a dear friend through relaxation techniques and postpartum massage. This lay experience was so profound she was compelled to pursue her certification as a birth doula, and is on the path to becoming a nurse midwife. Katherine sees pregnancy and birth as a rebirth of the female self, an unparalleled moment of shift; she aims to best serve her dynamic female community and their little ones by providing unbiased information and unconditional support…helping the women who birth with her find the power and intense love inherent in the birth process as a source of energy and confidence to be carried throughout motherhood.Now she’s done it – gone into a Nurse to Midwife Program. First there was Diana Torres, then Asya Portnaya followed by Frances Hernandez (graduate Midwives) and now Katherine joins Eva Skillkorn and Melanie Chevarie on the path to Midwifery>>>>>Daughters of the world, you are in the best of hands.

Shalawn Facey is a New York native, who grew up in Brooklyn. She had her first child in 2003 and became totally committed to motherhood. As a breastfeeding mother she quiclkly realized the importance of great support for breastfeeding moms. It was soon after that she began training and working as a post partum doula. She has since began supporting women in labor as well.

Shalawn has a passion for working with women and children. She is a trained doula with years of experience. When shes not working as a doula, you can find Shalawn working as a Birth Assistant here at the Brooklyn Birthing Center. She has been a Birth Assistant with us since 2007. She believes that women should have support before, during and after childbirth.

Sondra has been working as a birth assistant at BBC since 2009, and is also a birth doula. When she's not assisting at births, she works as a Health Educator providing sexual and reproductive health and HIV/STD prevention to women and adolescent girls in the East New York community. As a result of her experience at BBC, she has started taking classes so she can eventually go to nursing school.

Cheniqua Morales is a young nursing student who knew about the BBC since 2003 but couldn't imagine she might have a place here. Then a niece of hers gave birth in the care of a Midwife; that did it. She screwed up her courage and inquired about openings and has been with us since December of 2009. She became a Birth Assistant on October 1st. She will graduate as a R.N. in December of 2011 and is determined to continue on to become a Midwife. Oh...and she became a: wife" shortly after she became a Birth Assistant.