Sacred Ways Homebirth Empowering Journey for Mother, Gentle Beginning for Baby

Dena Moes, CNM, grew up in West Hollywood, CA. She went to Yale College where she studied Literature and Women’s Studies, and where she first became involved in feminism and women’s health issues.  After college she moved to New York City where she worked in a theatre company and did a great deal of soul-searching.  At the age of twenty-three, she first heard about homebirth, and someone gave her a copy of Ina May Gaskin’s Spiritual Midwifery.  By the time she finished reading it, Dena knew she was meant to be a midwife.

Dena first became a doula, and she volunteered her services at North Central Bronx Hospital. There, she supported laboring women who were uninsured, recent immigrants from Africa, Haiti, Central America and Albania.  She then attended Yale University School of Nursing's three-year program in nurse-midwifery. She received her RN in 1995 and her MSN in 1996, the same year she was certified in nurse-midwifery by the American College of Nurse Midwives. During schooling, Dena studied homebirth among the Old Order Amish in rural Pennsylvania. During this semester she attended thirty homebirths in a culture in which homebirth is the norm and birth is understood as a natural, normal event.

Since 1996, Dena has served birthing families in a variety of settings.

She first worked as a midwife in a small town in Kansas, where she attended almost every birth that happened in two rural hospitals over one year. She and her husband Adam then moved to the Santa Cruz area, where Adam studied Traditional Chinese Medicine. There, she worked as a labor and delivery nurse for two years, as well as provided primary care, gynecology, and family planning in a women's clinic. Dena's first daughter, Clarabel, was born at home in Santa Cruz.

Dena and her family moved to the Chico area in early 2002. She worked as a midwife for Paradise Midwifery Service at Feather River Hospital until her second daughter Sophia was born. By this time, Dena had attended about two hundred births. When her second daughter was close to turning two, she knew the time for her homebirth practice had come. In 2004, Sacred Ways Homebirth was born.