Midwives

The midwives at Andaluz are committed to providing personalized care for you and your baby. We love helping women and families through the transition of pregnancy and birth. Because we believe that continuity of care is important, each client has two primary midwives that serve her throughout her prenatal, birth and postpartum care.We attend births at our Portland Birth Center or your home.

 

 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

 

 

Jennifer Gallardo, CPM, LDM

Jennifer Gallardo, CPM,  was born at home in Puerto Rico into the hands of a midwife. She was raised in Latin America by her adventurous parents. She moved to the USA to attend University in 1986, where she met her husband, Fernando Gallardo. They had their first child in the hospital in the USA, in 1990.
Her second baby was born at home with a midwife, and this experience impassioned her to begin her midwifery journey. They moved to Guatemala with Jennifer’s family, where she went to midwifery school in Guatemala and attended births in the hospitals, slums, homes, and finally at a birth center she and her husband built in Guatemala City.
She has been a midwife since 1994 and she became a licensed midwife in the USA through the Seattle Midwifery School Challenge process in 1997, after becoming a certified professional midwife through the National Registry of Midwives.
Jennifer has attended over 1,000 births as a midwife. She has nine children and four grandchildren. She and her husband have opened five birth centers, including a non-profit birth center in Haiti which they currently manage and three birth centers in Oregon.
Jennifer loves continuing her learning about midwifery, catching babies, working internationally, spending time with her family, and jumping in rivers and oceans.

Carrie Duncan, CPM, LDM

Carrie was called to midwifery in 1996 after the homebirth of her daughter, Sierra, in Canby, Oregon. She attended homebirths with her midwife for two years before apprenticing at Andaluz. She graduated from Birthingway College of Midwifery in 2003. She practiced in Portland as a home birth midwife and has lived and practiced in rural Jamaica. Carrie believes that informed choice is a corner stone in quality healthcare and is proud to facilitate women’s choices as a midwife. She has two children, loves the outdoors and enjoys traveling, although only on her months off call!

Tracy Lawson-Allen, CPM, LDM

Tracy recognized after the birth of her first child that birth is a profound rite of passage in a woman’s life and that she wanted to do for others what her midwives had done for her. She arrived at Andaluz as a pregnant student midwife in the Fall of 2001 and it has been a home to her ever since. She apprenticed in a rural homebirth practice as well as another birth center during her studies between 2005 and 2008, but came to land back at Andaluz as a primary midwife in 2008. Tracy has been teaching childbirth education classes at Andaluz for over a decade now. She is passionate about holding the space for families to feel empowered by and in charge of their births, while offering evidence-based care. Native Oregonians, Tracy and her very musical husband are enjoying raising their five children in Oregon’s natural beauty.

Tracy is also a Mamalates Instructor and is the Vice-President of the Oregon Midwifery Council.

Amber Zietz, CNM

Amber was inspired to become a midwife after the birth of her son in 1990. It was after a brief encounter with a community midwife during her last weeks of her own pregnancy that she gained a sense of empowerment. This experience ignited a passion for empowering others to achieve a satisfying pregnancy and birth through information and support. 
She attended her first home birth as an assistant while in nursing school on the island of Kauai, Hawaii. The experience was transformational in that she witnessed the power and grace of a birthing woman in own her element.  
A graduate of Frontier Nursing University with a Master’s Degree in Nursing and a certificate of midwifery, Amber has been a Certified Nurse Midwife since 2005. During her 16 years as a midwife, she has had the privilege of caring for women and families while practicing in both the hospital, home, and birth center setting. 
When she is not attending to families, Amber enjoys exploring the local culinary delights, the beautiful outdoors of Portland and the surrounding areas with her precious rescue pup. She also enjoys spending time with her family and working on arts and crafts projects. 

Megan Coppock, CPM, LDM 

Megan was called to midwifery work during her own transition into motherhood. In 2006 when her son, Halen, was born at Legacy Emanuel hospital she was overcome with joy and amazement and felt awakened to a life force she had only caught glimmers of before. Three years later, when her daughter, Flora, was born into water at a birth center, she knew that she wanted deeply to support other women in pursuing the birth experience they envisioned for themselves and their baby. 
Megan quickly began absorbing birth books, magazines, and connecting with the local out of hospital birth community and eventually found her way to Birthingway College of Midwifery. She has been attending births at Andaluz since 2013, and graduated from Birthingway in 2015. 

Megan feels extremely honored to have the opportunity to serve women of all walks of life during their birthing year. She continues to feel inspired by the beauty, power, and vulnerability inherent in birth and birthing women. 

When not working with mamas and families she stays busy with her own little family, finding any excuse to play outside with her kids, garden, disappear to the mountains or the 
beach, eat good food, read books, and seek out new adventures! 

Brooke Prudhomme , CPM

Shortly after the birth of her youngest son in 2010, Brooke began her midwifery education as an apprentice with Trillium WomanCare, a home birth practice in Memphis, Tennessee. She has studied with the midwives at The Farm in Tennessee and was certified by the National Association of Registered Midwives in 2019. Brooke made vital contributions to the foundational organization and licensure of the first birth center in Memphis, CHOICES: Memphis Center for Reproductive Health, the only full-scope reproductive health center of it’s kind in the United States. After her time as a midwife at CHOICES, she founded Midwives of Memphis.

Her approach to midwifery is focused, dynamic and uplifting. Her curiosity and love of learning is central to her commitment to providing evidence based care and informed choice to families that is rooted in the science of midwifery. Brooke attended the University of Memphis with a focus on anthropology and fine art and is currently pursuing her RN, to be completed Winter of 2023. She developed and taught “Weekend Warrior” childbirth education classes and as an Ashtanga and Kundalini trained yogi she partnered with the founder of Delta Groove Yoga to develop “Yoga for Birth” which they co-taught together for most of Brooke’s midwifery apprenticeship.

Brooke is excited for the new adventure of relocating to Portland from Memphis with her partner and the youngest child of their blended family of six, while their adult children explore their paths all over the country. Brooke loves being in the woods, practicing yoga and meditation, running, studying and writing, good food, staying cozy with her family, chatting with her girlfriends, and laughing a lot. She is thrilled to be a part of the incredible team of midwives and birth professionals at Andaluz. 

Joanna Blondeau , MSN, CNM

Joanna knew as a child that she wanted to care for moms and babies. She began working toward this goal in 2004 by pursuing a degree in nursing. She graduated with her BSN degree in 2009 but had yet to discover her niche with nursing. 

It was the experience of care from midwives during her pregnancies and births that awakened her own calling to midwifery. She continued on to pursue midwifery studies through Frontier Nursing University not long after the birth of her second child. She graduated with honors with a Masters in Nursing in January 2019 and became a Certified Nurse Midwife. 

She has been involved with birth work in varying roles as a doula, labor & delivery nurse, and midwife since 2015 and has witnessed over 300 births. She most recently served women at a community health center, attending births at Legacy hospital  in Vancouver, WA and is thrilled to now be working out of the hospital with the midwives at Andaluz.

At her core, she believes that a woman’s body was designed for the physiological processes of pregnancy, labor, and giving birth. She is passionate about providing individualized, evidence-based, and holistic care to women in a way that empowers and supports her own healthcare decisions. 

She enjoys fitness, learning about nutrition, being outside, and spending time with her husband, three children, and large extended family.

Dele Ogunleye, MD, FACOG

Medical Director

Dr. Ogunleye’s love for the field was born out of an appreciation as obstetrics/gynecology being “the only specialty we have the privilege of caring for clients through all phases of life. Not only will you have an opportunity to get to know them before they have children, but also through the different milestones of their life afterwards, well into adulthood.”

“I have been fortunate to practice medicine in different countries on diverse continents. Having finished my medical school in Nigeria and subsequently training and practicing as an obstetrician/gynecologist in England, my foundations of collaboration with and appreciation of the need for mutual respect between midwives and obstetricians was formed. I learned a lot from deliveries that were done both in the hospital setting and also out of hospital deliveries in England. As is the case in many European countries, the majority of low risk deliveries are performed by midwives. It is usually the norm to have community midwives, hospital midwives and obstetricians all in the same team working in partnership.⠀

 “Before becoming an Ob/Gyn, I had the opportunity to rotate through other medical specialties. My love for the field was born out of an appreciation as obstetrics/gynecology being the only specialty we have the privilege of caring for clients through all phases of life. Not only will you have an opportunity to get to know them before they have children, but also through the different milestones of their life afterwards, well into adulthood.”⠀⠀⠀⠀

 After training as an obstetrician in England, Dr. Ogunleye completed his residency at Good Samaritan Hospital (Cincinnati, OH). When he was the chief resident at Good Samaritan Hospital, he helped to start the faculty midwifery team to complement residency services. Since 2004, he has been in Bloomington, IL, practicing as an attending Ob/Gyn in private practice.

 His experience with assisting thousands of babies into the world has helped shape his understanding that birth is a physiological process that, the majority of times, needs minimal to no medical intervention. This philosophy has led him to work with like-minded people to open the first privately owned free-standing birth center in Illinois (the Birth Center of Bloomington-Normal) and in Colorado Springs (Beginnings Birth Center). Dr Ogunleye is married with three children, two of whom were caught by midwives.

Laura Wiegand

Administrator

Having planted the seeds and nourished the growth of two other freestanding birth centers prior to launching Burr Ridge Birth Center, Laura’s immense expertise and guidance are well regarded both by our staff and at the state and national levels.

Laura Wiegand currently serves as the COO/Co-Founder of Birth Partners, Inc. She successfully managed the opening of the Birth Center of Bloomington Normal in Bloomington, Illinois, and assisted with opening Beginnings Birth Center, Colorado Springs, Colorado. ⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀

At the national level, she serves on the American Association of Birth Centers’ Industry Relations Committee (IRC). She works at the state and local level to educate the public, medical communities and health insurance providers about the benefits of the birth center model of care, including better outcomes, reduced costs for families & payors, and overall increased client satisfaction. ⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀

Laura didn’t know the difference birth centers could make until twenty years after she had her own children. Having always loved birth and had the honor of being able to witness several for her nieces and nephews, Laura has become the master champion and facilitator of the community-based model of care. Her enthusiasm, meticulous eye for detail, and advocate’s heart make Laura the invaluable glue that pulls the dream together. ⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀

Laura lives in Washington, IL, with her supportive and patient husband, Andy. Together they have two grown children, Shane and Elizabeth, and a “fur baby”, Layla. She credits her Mom, Grammy, and Aunties as the strong, independent women in her life that raised her to be passionate and impactful in her community. When she’s not immersed in building birth centers, she loves to travel and take in all the sights and experiences her destinations have to offer.

 

We can’t wait to meet you!

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