Our Warm Welcome Team
Warm Welcome Birth Services is an independent midwifery and doula practice serving Western Massachusetts. Our calling is
to help growing families thrive in pregnancy and support them as they welcome their new babies with clarity, respect and love. We have dedicated our lives to birth-work and to nurturing growing families, knowing that the ripples of a healthy, positive birth experience carry through a lifetime for parents and babies.
Get Started Now with My Contact Form
❊ Michelle L’Esperance, CPM
Michelle is the owner and primary midwife at Warm Welcome Birth Services. Attending 500+ births since 1996, she has collected and developed a multitude of insights and ideas to help families have more vibrant, healthy pregnancies and wonderful birthdays.
Whether teaching a roomful of expectant parents, supporting clients through their dream water-birth in the local hospital, or receiving a home-birthed baby into her hands at sunrise, Michelle radiates the joy that can usually be found just behind the curtain of birth’s intense work.
About Michelle
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.
“Just as a woman’s heart knows how and when to pump, her lungs to inhale, and her hand to pull back from fire, so she knows when and how to give birth.” Virginia Di Orio
❊ Apprentice/Primary Midwife Under Supervision
As an Approved Preceptor with the North American Registry of Midwives, Michelle educates the next generation, ensuring that your grandchildren can also be born into the loving hands of homebirth midwives. This traditional form of education involves several years of shadowing and hands-on learning as the apprentice advances towards mastery of all requisite midwifery skills. An apprentice assists at some prenatal visits, births, and most postpartum visits. Apprentices have completed doula training with Warm Welcome.
Apprentice Midwives
As an Approved Preceptor with the North American Registry of Midwives, Michelle educates the next generation, ensuring that your grandchildren can also be born into the loving hands of homebirth midwives. This traditional form of education involves several years of shadowing and hands-on learning as the apprentice advances towards mastery of all requisite midwifery skills. An apprentice may assist at prenatal visits, births, and postpartum visits.
❊ Assistant Midwives
Warm Welcome Birth Services engages a second midwife to attend your homebirth along with Michelle. You will meet this midwife at least once prenatally and will have a visit after your birth with that midwife as well. Following are profiles of the midwives we most frequently call on for this. We sometimes call on other midwives not listed here. The second midwife is selected based on geography, calendar availability and harmony with the birthing family. All midwives, apprentices and interns with Warm Welcome are LGBTQ+-identified or friendly. We delight in serving a wide variety of families, including those with a spiritual or religious orientation, step, blended, adoptive, surrogate, and traditional.
No Accordion Found
❊ Interns
Homebirth midwifery clients have the option of an intern’s support during their birthing day at no additional charge. The intern works unobtrusively in the background; cooking, cleaning, doing laundry, tending to your pets, and helping with the midwives’ paperwork. This person is on the path to midwifery, trained as a doula with Michelle, and serves as an intern for a year or more before advancing to the hands-on work of apprenticeship. If you are interested in having an intern at your birth, you will meet them at a prenatal before your birth.
“A midwife should have a lady’s hands, a hawk’s eyes and a lion’s heart.” Aristotle
Choose from five options to meet me and explore how your pregnancy and birth can be great on your own terms. Partners always welcome.
❊ Let’s Get Started
My free consults are perfect for those who are pregnant or trying to conceive. We can focus on homebirth midwifery care or doula care, or explore both. Let’s brainstorm together so I can help you imagine just how wonderful your baby’s birth can be with an experienced doula or midwife by your side.
Office consultations >> Northampton MA. Some weekend appointments available.
Book your Free Consult Now
You are welcome to call during normal business hours 7 days a week at (413) 858-5048 or fill out my contact form using the button above and we’ll be in touch. If you just want written info at this point, I can email you detailed information about the range of services I provide.
“I imagine a world in which
all humans are born with an
intact capacity to love,
and I am willing to devote my life
to making it happen.”
-Robin Lim
