A new home birth midwives collective in south east Wisconsin
Updated: Nov 17
Meet Génnisi Birth Services. Who they are and what's their practice going to look like when they start taking home birth clients in early 2024.
They are Fiona George, CPM; Jessie Heppner, CPM; Chelsey Isaacson, CPM; Angela Guzzardo, CNM; and Dr. Kelsey Pendleton, MD.
I interviewed Chelsey, one of the CPM (Certified Professional Midwife) to know more about the project. Here's what she told me:
"Most of all got into midwifery in order to do home births in the first place and that was an end goal for us. So we just collectively after little conversations here and there, all came to the decision that we wanted to do home births and we wanted to do it together. We've all learned from each other and grown together all of these years so just made sense for us to go off on the venture together.
Currently there are three CPMs, one nurse midwife and then Dr. Kelsey is our physician, and her joining the team as well it was just a no-brainer. There aren't many physicians at a home birth setting, so it's going to be a huge blessing for our community."
What do you think is needed in the community? Are there any issues that they would like to try to help with?
"Making home birth more accessible to the community, feels really important to me.
When I was looking for a home birth midwife while I was living in Port Washington, there weren't very many providers that would go out that way. So I'm really excited to help expand that in the area and also take some load off of the few midwives in the area."
What can you say about the money issue and how it's known that out of hospital births are very expensive and they are not for everybody specially for minorities and people that really can't afford?
"Out of hospital births in general is really unaccessible to a lot of people. That's actually one of the reasons why we as a group are deciding to go homebirth as opposed to the birth center because we want more people to be able to afford to have a home birth and we never want it to be a financial decision.
We aren't planning on accepting commercial insurances, but we do work with a biller who will help submit to insurances, if the family desires.
We will be accepting state insurance because that's really important all of us."
What types of births will you be taking?
"We are always learning and educating ourselves in different types of births, like breech and multiples. However, right now we are not in a place where we feel comfortable taking breech and twins yet. But we'll be happy to take VBAC clients.
We do have a lot of methods that we can use to try to turn breech babies, so we'll do everything we can to have those babies at home."
How does it work if someone wants to book any of you?
"Currently if you go onto our website and fill out the consultation form, then you'll have the option to pick a preferred midwife. So from there if your preferred midwife has availability then she'll reach out to you and she would be doing the interview and make sure it's a good fit, because that's really important. Whoever you choose will be your primary midwife throughout your prenatal and postpartum periods. As a team made up of primarily mothers ourselves, we are working hard to cultivate sustainability in this work and will share a rotating call schedule for births."
Chelsey mentioned they are planning on taking between 2 and 4 clients per month each one of them.
They are taking clients with estimated date of birth from April 2024. They will serve a 30 minute radius from Wauwatosa.
(262) 432 - 3142