Our Warm Welcome Team

Whether teaching a roomful of expectant parents, supporting a client through their dream waterbirth in the local hospital, or receiving a homebirthed baby into her hands at sunrise, Michelle radiates the joy that can usually be found just behind the curtain of birth’s intense work.

Michelle began assisting at homebirths in 1996. Inspired by a talk by the legendary midwife Ina May Gaskin, her studies at Smith concentrated around medical anthropology and women’s health. She visited The Farm in Tennessee, and is deeply grateful for the kind, personal encouragement Ina May gave her there, early on her path to midwifery. In 1997 Michelle’s first child was born at home in Conway, MA; a beautiful solstice birth. Soon after, she completed a doula training and a year of traditional apprenticeship, before continuing on to a MEAC-accredited midwifery program in Florida.

Warm Welcome Birth Services was launched in 2001, initially providing birth and postpartum doula care. That same year Michelle was asked to teach a birth doula training, and has trained hundreds of doulas since. Her second pregnancy ended in a first-trimester miscarriage that year. Her rainbow baby (*first surviving child after a loss) was born gently at home in 2002. After 2004 midwifery school graduation Michelle attended 100 births at an inner-city clinic in San Pedro Sula, Honduras. Witnessing that despite poor nutrition, poverty, and very rudimentary facilities, 99% of those births were normal vaginal births – affirmed Michelle’s belief in the natural integrity of the birth process.

Michelle became a Certified Professional Midwife in 2005, and an Approved Preceptor with the North American Registry of Midwives in 2014. Her current practice includes expert birth doula care for hospital or birth center; midwifery care for pregnancy and homebirth; and nurturing postpartum care.

Michelle has attended over 500 births in homes, freestanding birth centers, domestic and foreign hospitals since 1996. Her areas of special interest include facilitating optimal fetal positioning during pregnancy and birth, helping those with prior cesarean births have joyful VBACs, birth hypnosis, and birth as a transformative experience. She regularly accepts invitations to speak on these topics to area hospitals’ labor and delivery staff, as well as to local college classes. Michelle is the author and teacher of numerous curricula, including the popular Creative Movement: Practical Prep for a Positive Birth.

Michelle is Chilean-American, and is fluent in Spanish. In her spare time, she enjoys yoga, heirloom gardening, beekeeping, knitting, and dancing salsa.