Meet Jen
Certified Birth Doula, Postpartum Doula, Certified Childbirth Educator, Bereavement Specialist, THW
Jen has long had a heart to serve families in birth support after being a childbirth educator in the Portland and Vancouver area for the past 20 years. Jen also has a heart for the family that has experienced grief and loss, has extensive experience working in a hospital setting while also maintaining a calm and supportive atmosphere, and will keep you laughing through contractions or middle of the night feedings. You may have met Jen in a hospital tour, a new parent support group, or in one of her many childbirth educator classes, and she brings that same warm energy to her overnight doula work.
More About Jen
Jen has long had a heart to serve families in birth and postpartum support after being a childbirth educator in the Portland and Vancouver area for the past 20 years. She initially desired to become a midwife but after realizing the commitment involved would take her away from parenting her 3 kids during the important teen years, she shifted her gears to supporting families through labor, birth and postpartum. We couldn’t be more excited to include her in our team offering birth and postpartum support to our clients expecting twins, triplets, surrogate births, or any high-risk birth situation.
Jen’s extensive list of certifications include:
Certified Childbirth Educator (ICEA)
Bereavement Doula (Stillbirthday)
Labor Doula (CAPPA)
Postpartum Doula (CAPPA)
She has taken additional advanced training in
Working with Multiples
Spinning Babies
Overnight support is one of Jen’s favorite ways to work with families when they are spent, need rest and healing, and those struggling in early postpartum. Jen can provide continuity of care doing both the birth and postpartum care and she has experience with premature babies, twins, and parents experiencing depression and anxiety.
Teaching Childbirth Education for the past 2 decades has introduced Jen to many different ways to welcome babies into the world, and she has a passion for each family to have a safe and supported environment even when there are are multiple medical interventions necessary to deliver a baby (or multiple babies).
She hosts tours both within the Legacy Health System as well as OHSU which has familiarized her with the helpful staff and setup of area hospitals who help bring babies into the world, even when there are high risk pregnancies or situations that require a more technical approach to birth. Jen calls these technical births (often called high risk pregnancies). With the cesarean rate at 1/3 of births in the Portland and Vancouver metro areas, it fuels our believe that c-sections don’t rule out the need or value of a doula’s support.
Jen also has a heart for the family that has experienced grief and loss, stemming from her own experience with miscarriage and support of a dear friend through a pregnancy ‘incompatible with life’. This became her catalyst to certify with Stillbirthday as a doula, and now she has been able to support multiple families who have experienced loss go on to have a successful subsequent birth filled with the bittersweet joy.
As a bereavement specialist she also offers support to families welcoming rainbow babies and those who have experienced loss. Although pregnancy can be a time of great joy and expectation, it can also be a time of great anxiety, fear, and can bring up a lot of feelings from past experiences that can muddy the waters of the process. Jen has additional extensive expertise supporting these families to help blend the joy and the pain into their own unique experience, with her full heart, all her labor, birth & postpartum skills, and a calm understanding to normalize the experience, even when it isn’t what is expected.
In her free time Jen likes to cheer on her kids at their different sporting events, work in her garden, and remodel her property. She especially enjoys the aspect of having her teen drivers available to help her transport her bunch. She also is a long distance runner— although less for joy and more to to benefit her brain—and she enjoys good coffee only slightly more than good beer. When she has a minute between clients, she enjoys connecting with friends and colleagues over a delicious glass of something wonderful.