Jackie Griggs is a certified nurse midwife in the Houston area since 1989. She attended The University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston to obtain a master’s degree in nursing. She owned and operated Bay Area Birth Center in Pasadena from 2005-2017, and now owns Midwife in the Heights and Birth Center of Beaumont. She is on the Board of Directors of the American Association of Birth Centers since 2013. She is active with the Consortium of Texas Certified Nurse Midwives, and the Association of Texas. She is a writer and is currently working on a book about her experiences as a midwife. Jackie has precepted many nursing and midwifery students, and thinks it is very important to raise new midwives. Jackie is the mother of five sons, three of which were born at home with the assistance of midwives. She loves her work and has no plans to retire.
Rowan TwoSisters
Rowan TwoSisters, midwife, pelvic floor scar remediation, trauma-informed pelvic exams and STI testing, Arvigo Mayan abdominal massage, labor whispering, and pregnancy loss support.
She will tell us about the booth at B.I.R.T.H. Fair for Queers, the pregnancy loss support group, the afterbirth postpartum support group, Preggers Can Be Choosers.
Sarah Owens
Sarah Owens is a Certified Nurse-Midwife at Nativiti Family Birth Center and Women’s Health Associates in The Woodlands, Texas, where she provides newborn care and full-scope midwifery care for childbearing women. She earned her Bachelor of Science in Nursing in 2004. After the empowering birth of her first child in 2005, she began working in labor and delivery which included support of vaginal birth after cesarean. Later, her myriad of experiences as a travel nurse led her to pursue a career as a Certified Nurse-Midwife which came to fruition in 2018. Most recently, Sarah has completed a quality improvement project involving VBAC/TOLAC (Vaginal Birth After Cesarean/Trial of Labor After Cesarean) counseling and informed consent as she pursues her Doctorate of Nursing Practice, with an expected graduation date of Sept. 28, 2019. Sarah’s passion is to see the ACOG recommendation, that women with a history of cesarean birth be counseled about and offered a trial of labor after cesarean, become a reality for all women. Sarah, her husband, and three children recently relocated from Salem, Oregon, for her new position at Nativiti. They look forward to all the adventures Texas has to offer.
Afua Hassaine and Patricia Ghaly
Afua Hassaine and Patricia Ghaly
Afua Hassaine moved to Houston to pursue a career in midwifery. She graduated from the Houston School of Midwifery in 1984. Afua is the founder, owner and licensed midwife of The Birthing Place. The Birthing Place is the only free standing birth center that is owned by and operated by a black midwife in the city of Houston. Her business is located in the historically African American community of Third Ward. The best services are the homegrown mom and pop businesses and she is proud if it. She believes the mother is the captain, the partner is the co-captain and Afua is the advisor. Being a midwife with over 30 years of experience, she has seen a lot and that is why the client will always choose their path/journey when you are a client of The Birthing Place.
Patricia Ghaly has been a Licensed Midwife since 2014 and has been caring for women through their birth work since 2005. She believes women have the right to choose what care is best for them and their babies. Patty became a midwife because she strongly believes women should have the opportunity to birth the way they wish. She trained as a doula with Childbirth International after her second child was born. Upon completing her training, Patty attended births in Abu Dhabi and Egypt, and soon learned that, while doulas are certainly valuable to have at a birth, hospital rule trumps all. She went on to earn a degree in Midwifery from the Midwives College of Utah. Being a midwife allows her to provide a supportive, caring environment for all women. At Cy-Fair Birth Center, they offer a celebration of pregnancy, birth and postpartum that every mother/baby deserves. They believe every baby should come into the world celebrated and the midwives try to do that from the first visit all the way through the postpartum period by taking care of mom, pampering her, and ensuring she gets off to a good start in her parenting journey and her new identity as a mother.
Midwifery, Andie Wyrick and Jaelin Stickels
Midwifery, Andie Wyrick and Jaelin Stickels
A certified nurse midwife and doctorate student, Andie Wyrick has been in the Houston birth community for over a decade. Her experience includes elementary school nursing, hospital L & D, birth center, and home birth. Andie is confident in a woman’s ability to grow and birth her baby. She feels a partnership in care is empowering and hopes to foster that relationship with families. She has a tender, lighthearted, and hands-off approach to the evidence-based care she offers. She has been joyfully dating her husband of 18 years since junior high school and has five children. Her passions beyond bellies, birth, and breastfeeding are mission work and reading. Her claims to fame are winning fast money on Family Feud and having her nipple illustrated in Ina May’s Guide to Breastfeeding.
Jaelin Stickels is a certified nurse midwife and women’s health nurse practitioner who is honored to work with women and their families as they experience pregnancy, labor, birth, and the postpartum period. Jaelin followed her passion into midwifery and has been practicing with women and babies since 2010. She has spent the last 35 blissful years married to her high school sweetheart. She has three children and one grandchild. In addition to her passion for women’s health, she loves quilting and spends her spare time running the www.sheis.com website and being enamored with her granddaughter.
Kirsten Nottleson
Kirsten Nottleson is the proud mama of two sons, 13 and 19 years old. She is the owner and founder of Hand In Hand Workshops in Austin, Texas. She has been playing and working with children, parents, caregivers, and teaching professionals since 1993. Her focus is nurturing the relationship between children and their caregivers. Her topics include Play, Discipline, Sibling and Social Issues, Development, Classroom and Home Environment, Connection, Brain Science, Emotional Safety and Release, Laughter, Creativity, and Attachment.
She is passionate about Play, Emotional Release, and Connection. She understands that parents want their children to be happy, healthy, and have good, big lives. She sees that most parents are working under significant stress, with insufficient support. She helps parents understand their own history, build a support network, and add playfulness to their family life in order to parent more consciously and effectively. Kirsten LOVES teaching all kinds of workshops, especially ones that involve Play, Pillow Fights, and Wrestling.
She has worked extensively with families with substance abuse issues. She is especially proud of her Peer Education Parenting Curriculum that she helped develop and brought into 14 Texas prisons, training inmates to listen to one another to help each other heal. Her work is based on the Parenting by Connection Approach which she believes to be nothing short of Peace Movement in Action.
Deonesia Grays
Deonesia Grays, founder of Bria’s House, discusses the importance of drowning prevention. She has a passion for educating families and providing services to help other families avoid tragedy.
Addiction Series: Noel Love
Noel Love, LPC Intern, LCDC, Director of Family Programs at Kemah Palms Recovery Center, joins us to discuss the meaning of addiction.
Linda Jones
Linda Jones is a birth and postpartum doula, photographer, and mother of two, grandmother of four and great-grandmother of three, who lives in Oakland, CA. She founded and owned Waddle and Swaddle Baby Boutique and Birth Resource Center in Berkeley, CA from 2000 to 2010 and has been a part of the natural birth advocacy and reproductive justice community in the Bay Area for almost three decades.
Linda is one of the co-founders of Black Women Birthing Justice (BWBJ) and is coauthor of Battling Over Birth and Black Women and the Maternal Health Care Crisis in California.
Linda’s recent work has been centered around training and mentoring women of color to be doulas for low income women of color. This was started in 2014 when she was a part of the East Bay Community Birth Support Project. This group has gone on to morph into the Roots of Labor Birth Collective (RLBC). Linda was a part of the group that helped formulate this organization and hire the people that are now members of the collective. Her role now is as a support person.
Linda feels that the work she is now doing with BWBJ and RLBC, is adding to the fulfillment of the work she has done the past three decades. Helping families bring babies into the world and get their families started the best possible way has helped heal her own traumatic birth experiences.
Being able to potentially change how women of color presently are treated during birth makes her heart full.
Dr. Jennifer Harvey
Dr. Jennifer Harvey, Raising White Kids: Bringing Up Children in Racially Unjust America
Dr. Jennifer Harvey is a writer, speaker, and professor of religion at Drake University where she also serves as Faculty Director for the Crew Scholars Program. She has a Ph.D. in Christian Ethics from Union Theological Seminary in the City of New York. Her work focuses primarily on racial justice and white anti-racism. Dr. Harvey’s most recent books include Raising White Kids: Bringing Up Children in Racially Unjust America (Abingdon Press) and Dear White Christians: For Those Still Longing for Racial Reconciliation (Wm. B. Eerdmans). Dr. Harvey has contributed to the New York Times, CNN and been a guest on both Iowa and National Public Radio (including NPR’s “It’s Been a Minute with Sam Sanders”).
In the introduction to her book, she emphasizes the importance of white children understanding they are living in a country built by white people for white people and, as such, they need to be aware and acknowledge the privilege which is automatically conferred upon them. To create a society in which all the people in this country can experience equality, justice and fairness, requires white children to learn how to become allies to all those who do not have such privilege, instead of just accepting and embracing this privilege.