Meet The Staff
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Our midwives are licensed and certified women’s health care practitioners, trained to care for healthy women with low-risk pregnancies. We work in consultation and collaboration with obstetricians, perinatologists and pediatricians, and have a wonderful group of doulas and birth assistants to complete our team.
We choose to work as a team and we keep our client load moderate so that we can always have two midwives on call, while having time to attend to our own families and health. This way we can show up well-resourced for our clients and avoid burnout.
Our 50+ years of combined experience and constant communication within the practice means the best possible care for you!
Laurel Phillips, LM
Owner, Director
After many years of apprenticeship with SB Midwifery during which I was able to assist at hundreds of births, I attended the National Midwifery Institute and became a licensed midwife in March 2011. I have been working with SB Midwifery since 1996 and became a partner in 2011, and owner in 2021. I am also the founder and president of the Santa Barbara Birth Center. In January 2020 I stepped out of clinical care and into the Director role full time.
I cherish the connections I make with new clients at intake as they explore the option of midwifery care for their birth journey.
Nikole Paulos, LM CPM
My calling to serve women, babies, and families was born from a passion to help make the world a more peaceful place. Through a lifelong journey studying nutrition, healing through food, herbalism, homeopathy, pre and perinatal psychology, craniosacral therapy, yoga and women’s spirituality, I have traveled a path with all roads leading to midwifery. My foundational belief being that when we are in connection with ourselves, we are able to more fully connect with our baby and partner. It is from this place of connection that we accept the support, love, and blessings that life offers us. I stared my career in 2000 as a doula and student midwife in Salt Lake City, Utah. After completing Direct Entry Midwifery School and an apprenticeship, I became a Certified Professional Midwife in 2003. After a move to Santa Barbara in 2004, I founded and served as President for The Central Coast Doula Association, and in 2009 became a California Licensed Midwife. During this time I birthed two children at home, both were water births adding to my experience and knowledge in profound ways. In 2011, I had the privilege to start working with the Santa Barbara Midwifery team and helped open the doors of the Santa Barbara Birth Center where I serve women in conscious conception, pregnancy, labor, birth, and the transition into parenthood.
Alissa Herbert, LM CPM
I began my love of birth while preparing to give birth to my daughter, Madelyne, in 2006. After my son, Miles, was born in 2008, I attended my first birth as a doula in the role that would nurture my journey into midwifery. I started attending home births with Santa Barbara Midwifery as a birth assistant in 2010 and decided to become a midwife myself in 2014. I recently graduated from National Midwifery Institute and became a licensed midwife in 2018 after being lucky enough to apprentice with these amazing mentors! I am passionate about serving women and their families by giving them knowledge, confidence, love and support as they make this beautiful journey into parenthood. I feel blessed to be a part of this event in the lives of so many families with this team of amazing women. When I’m not at births, my husband, Bill, the kids, and I love to go to the beach and ride our bikes. Every now and then I get to read a book or work on a sewing project.
Courtney Stern, CNM WHNP
After experiencing two blissful pregnancies and homebirths, during which I was given the kind of care that I believe birthing people deserve, I became a certified birth doula so that I could support families in creating the birth experience that was right for them.
After four years of working as a doula, I chose to become a CNM and WHNP through the University of Pennsylvania, while also working as a Registered Nurse at The Birth Center of Lifecycle Womancare in Bryn Mawr, PA. I have attended over 200 births in homes, birth centers, and hospitals, and I have served hundreds of families in the office setting providing comprehensive gynecological care, primary care, family planning services, and well woman care.
What began as an innate fascination with pregnancy, birth, and babies has become a passion for educating and empowering families about their choices in healthcare. My aim is to ensure that the people I work with live and birth with awareness: awareness of their options, their strength, their innate abilities, and the inner guidance that is inherent within them. I am constantly in awe of our clients, and honored by the privilege and blessing of walking alongside them as they move through some of the most intimate and transformative experiences of their lives.
Beth Lang CNM
I fell in love with Santa Barbara while spending four years here at UCSB. Being called to midwifery led me to continue my education at Columbia University School of Nursing where I obtained my Master's degree and became a Certified Nurse-Midwife in 2007. I worked in New York City in the public health setting at Bellevue Hospital as a CNM until early 2015 when I moved back to Santa Barbara with my family and joined the Santa Barbara Midwifery and Birth Center practice. At the end of 2017, I welcomed my 3rd child (and then 4th child two years later) with our practice, took an extended maternity leave and I'm looking forward to returning part-time. I am passionate about a woman's right to choose her reproductive and birthing plans, including where and how to give birth. There is nothing more sacred than holding space with a laboring woman and new family, and it is a privilege I carry with the utmost respect and honor.
I love doing yoga, running, being in the ocean and attending lots of youth sports games for my kids. I live with my husband Darren and my four children (11, 8, 4.5 and 2.5 years) who were all born at home.
Student Midwives
Zoe Quinn
Student Midwife
I am very pleased and grateful to be joining the SBBC team as a student midwife. I am an Ojai native, where I presently live with my husband and two children. I was put on the path to midwifery after the homebirth of my firstborn. His birth was absolutely exquisite and I truly feel that being cared for by midwives in the comfort of my home significantly contributed to that. It was the first time that I experientially understood what "sacred" meant, and I was looking up midwifery schools within days. Since then, I have worked as a doula, childbirth educator, birthed a beautiful daughter, and have enrolled in midwifery school. It's my mission to ensure that other people have Birth Experiences that are joyful and empowering, for the whole family, like mine were. I also want to work together to shift the culture of "postpartum neglect" that the majority of us American mothers endure. We desperately need to recalibrate the expectations of new parents and cultivate communities thay really know how to nurture and care for famlies with infants. I humbly offer you my care and encouragement and am honored to serve you on your path to becoming a parent or bringing a sibling into the world.
Midwife Assistants
This team of dynamic women have decades of doula experience amongst them. As a part of your birth team they help the midwives with most aspects of care & offer support to you during your birth.
Jennifer Gibian, MA CLEC
Since 2006 I have had the honor of supporting families of all kinds in pregnancy, birth, and the postpartum period. In my work with mothers, fathers, partners and babies I wear many hats: birth & postpartum doula, midwife assistant, childbirth educator, massage practitioner, La Leche League leader, lactation educator & counselor. I feel so fortunate to be a part of these truly awesome, transformative moments in the lives of new and growing families. These experiences continually expand my awareness of what it means to give birth and to become a parent. In between births I like to hike with my dog, eat great food, take modern dance classes, travel and spend time with my wonderful family and friends.
Kari Acuri
Midwife Assistant, Office Manager
My love for supporting women through pregnancy and birth began with my own birth experiences, they were the source of inspiration to be a birth worker and support women during their own childbirth experience. After a career as an Environmental Consultant and then being a stay at home mom for a decade I started down the path of supporting pregnant women in 2012 when I became a DONA Certified Birth Doula. I have grown my birth doula practice in our community since then supporting moms and their partners at hospital, home and birth center births. I wanted to support families more and in other ways so a few years later I pursued a certification as a Childbirth Educator in order to offer group and private lessons to families in our community and then in 2015 I was certification as a Lactation Counselor through the Healthy Childrens Project. In 2017 I had the good fortune to join the team at the Santa Barbara Birth Center as a Midwife Assistant supporting both the midwives and those in labor. In addition to my birth work at the birth center I am also the Office Manager where I not only handle the daily operations of the birth center but get the opportunity to work closely with the midwives and clients.
Christiannah Williams-Ehrman
Hi, I’m Christiannah or “Chrissy” and I provide tailored labor and postpartum doula services to families in the Santa Barbara area. My services are based in honoring and practicing long-established traditions of caring for the mother throughout her birth journey. I am a wife, mother, and fun fact: I’m also a licensed Esthetician! I came into the world of birthwork in 2019 while pregnant with my own little one studying to become a certified Doula, as well as a Pelvic Steam Therapist. In 2021, the Santa Barbara Birth Center invited me to join their team as a Midwife’s Assistant. This has definitely added to my knowledge and experience of various natural and birther-led approaches to birthwork. I am very passionate about caring for the mother and family during this special time in their lives. It was through my own experience of being pregnant and going through childbirth during the height of the 2020 pandemic lockdown and missing out on the much needed traditional support, that I knew where my focus would be. My goal is to nurture the mother so that she may nurture the baby, one family at a time.
Simone Duffet
I am a birth and postpartum doula, a midwife assistant, a prenatal yoga instructor, and a botanical dye artist. I have a passion for wild crafted botanicals, reproductive justice, and cooking. I am a warm and comforting nurturer with a solid, grounding presence. My life philosophy is to see the world in abundance, which leads me to invest in self-love, human connection, time in nature, personal growth and community care.
Judi Cearnal
Over the years, I have found great joy and meaning in mothering and grand mothering. Much of it, I would imagine, is because I am a nurturer at heart. However, I must contribute some of this fulfillment to the support I received while birthing two of my babies. I discovered from my own homebirths, attended by the founding midwives of SB Midwifery, the immeasurable and lifelong benefits that the midwife model of care imparts onto mom, baby, and family. The sense of confidence, empowerment, and wellbeing I felt, following my births, radiated beyond my postpartum period, and flowed into the many decades I have spent nurturing. It was while supporting my daughter during her long and beautiful labors, attended by the gifted SB Midwives, that I found myself drawn to birth work. Compelled, I jumped right in, becoming a Certified Lactation Counselor in 2022 after completing a course through the Healthy Children Project Center for Breastfeeding, and then becoming a DONA Certified Doula in 2023. As a doula, I find supporting women on their journey through pregnancy and birth is about giving them the reins to make their own decisions about how to birth their babies and then respecting their wishes without judgement.
I am honored to be expanding my knowledge and awareness of birth in a place where physiological birth is the norm and where the midwives and midwife assistants create space for safe, satisfying, and empowering birthing.
