Jennifer Braddock

Interim manager, midwifery services, Alameda Health System-Highland Hospital

For as long as I can remember, I’ve always been drawn to pregnancy and childbirth. When I was 8 years old, I announced to my parents that I wanted to deliver babies when I grew up. I don’t feel like I chose midwifery, but rather, midwifery chose me.

There’s not too many things left in the world today that truly take your breath away. But for me, birth is so miraculous. It’s so phenomenal. It’s powerful. It’s sacred.

Pregnancy and childbirth are transformational, really, in the lives of the birthing mothers, and the fathers, and the families that this baby is going to be born into. For me, birth is a shared human experience. It transcends culture, and race, and geography. The hope, and the beauty, when a child is born, there’s nothing like it.

Highland is a wonderful place to have a baby. We value safe birth. We value low-intervention and physiologic birth. We normalize the birth process. We listen to them, and hear them, the things that they want for themselves, for their babies. We want those things too.

My colleagues are a very fierce, committed, passionate bunch of doctors, midwives, lactation consultants, social workers, behavioral health workers. We’re a diverse group. We value diversity. And we value our outcomes.

It means the world to me to work here at Highland Hospital, because I’m from Oakland, born and raised. I often run into my patients—women, families, fathers, grandmothers—in the community. I’ve gone to so many baby showers and baptisms of my patients. I’m humbled by them allowing me in at such a vulnerable time. They would say that they’ve been blessed and they’ve been cared for, but I feel like I’m the one that’s privileged to be able to take care of them during such an amazing time in their life.