The Midwife Center is pleased to welcome our two new Ruth Brexendorf Stifel Fellows, Aya Eliza-Christie, MSN, CNM and Ashley Iverson, MSN, CNM. Both Aya and Ashley have worked as nurses at The Midwife Center and are familiar faces for many of our clients.
Aya and Ashley will care for our clients in the office for primary gynecological and prenatal visits and during labor, birth, and postpartum at the birth center and the hospital.
Meet Aya
Aya Eliza-Christie, MSN, CNM is very excited to be a fellow at The Midwife Center! She has wanted to be a midwife for a long time. She first earned degrees in Social Work and Latin American Studies from the University of Pittsburgh. From 1999 through 2006 she was a counselor in women's health clinics and a community organizer for national and local Reproductive Justice organizations. She trained to be a DONA certified community-based doula and worked with the Birth Circle from 2007 through 2011. During her time at the Birth Circle, she focused on care for Spanish-speaking families and building community and resource networks for immigrant and refugee families.
Aya went to nursing school at the University of Pittsburgh and then become a Labor and Delivery nurse in the WomanCare Birth Center at Magee in 2013. She also worked as a casual birth nurse at The Midwife Center in 2014 and as a clinic nurse at Allegheny Reproductive Health Center in 2017.
Aya graduated from Frontier Nursing University with her MSN in early 2017. She is excited to build skills and grow as a new midwife over the course of the fellowship. Her goals as a care provider are to foster community-based care and increase leadership of communities of color, increase access to care for LGBTQ folks and families, and promote trauma-informed care.
Meet Ashley
Ashley Iverson, MSN, CNM earned her nursing degree from the University of Colorado-Anschutz. After graduation, she spent several years working as a pediatric critical care nurse, including three years at Children’s Hospital of Pittsburgh in the cardiac ICU.
Inspired by the care she received during her own pregnancy and birth at The Midwife Center, Ashley began working as a nurse at TMC in 2014 and applied to a midwifery program shortly after. She graduated from Frontier Nursing University’s nurse-midwifery program in 2017.
Ashley is honored to care for women and families in vulnerable and transformative times. She and her husband have four daughters—two of whom were born at The Midwife Center.
About the fellowship
The Midwife Center's Ruth Brexendorf Stifel Fellowship, developed in 2010, helps The Midwife Center address the national shortage of midwives with birth center experience and therefore have more of an impact on maternal and infant health outcomes in our region and beyond. It also addresses TMC’s long-term goals of providing educational opportunities for midwives to strengthen the midwifery profession and birth center model of care, which are being recognized locally and nationally as providing high-quality, low-cost care.
Learn more about the Ruth Brexendorf Stifel Fellowship and other programs of The Midwife Center.
