Meet The Team

Austin Area Birthing Center Celebrates 35 Years and 10,500+ babies

Austin Area Birthing Center has been serving Austin and the surrounding areas since 1987. Founded by Jean Stokes, RN, CPM, AABC grew from a busy home birth practice to accommodate rising demand for out-of-hospital birth in our community. As Austin has grown, so have we! We have two locations to serve you, one in North Austin and one in South Austin.

We are accredited by the Commission for the Accreditation of Birth Centers, which means that we maintain a high standard for safety and patient care. Because of our long history in the community, we have well-established relationships with area hospitals, obstetricians, maternal fetal medicine specialists, and pediatricians. We work with these community partners to co-manage care for clients when appropriate and transfer care when a client’s needs are outside the midwifery scope of practice.

One thing that makes our practice unique is the varied professional backgrounds of our midwives. We have both certified nurse midwives and certified professional midwives. We even have midwives who were trained in other countries before obtaining their licensure in the Unites States. Our midwives respect and benefit from each other’s experience, and so do our clients. No matter their type of certification or where they trained, our midwives are brought together by a passion for supporting families through the process of pregnancy, childbirth, and the transition to parenthood. Our philosophy of care is that birth is a normal, physiologic process and that community birth is not only safe but optimal care for low-risk clients and their babies.

At Austin Area Birthing Center, we understand that birth is a transformative experience in a family’s life, and we are humbled and honored that we have the opportunity to be a part of this moment in our clients’ lives. We strive every day to provide care that is client-centered, with a strong emphasis on empowering families to be fully involved in their care from the first visit to the last check-up. By offering childbirth education classes, group prenatal care, and postpartum groups, we hope to help new families build a strong, supportive community during pregnancy and early parenthood.

AABC Company Culture – A Set of Shared Beliefs,
Values and Practices

The seven values we want to see represented in our organization:

Birth is a transformative time in a woman and her family’s life. We trust the process and believe in natural childbirth at AABC by recognizing this first and most important basic principle.
AABC is client-centered. We are nothing without our clients. Our belief is that the client and the family always come first and that the midwives and staff will be as flexible as possible when it comes to fulfilling client needs. We are humbled and awed by the chance to be involved in this sacred time in a woman’s life.
We partner with our clients to provide the best care possible. Exemplary care at AABC requires the woman to be deeply involved in her process. We recognize that each client is a whole person, not just a body, and through education, providing choices, and gentle guidance, we offer a woman self-determination in her reproductive and birthing choices.
We are passionate and determined. Great just isn’t good enough – we want to be amazing. We want to be the best birthing center in the United States. We strive for every birth to be a safe and positive experience in a family’s life.
We have great respect for the diversity of our staff and the varied paths that have led us to this calling. We are building a positive team and family spirit among midwives, assistants, staff and teachers. We believe in the highest level of collaboration by focusing on the sharing of wisdom and utilizing each other’s knowledge and skills to provide the best fusion of care possible.
We practice a common sense blend of natural age-old midwifery wisdom and innovative state of the art, evidence-based care. We honor birth tradition while refusing to compromise our principles and accept the status quo.
We are devoted to building a strong, supportive community within which our Moms, Babies and Families will find like-minded people to help them through the unique experience of pregnancy and early parenting. Modern life can be very isolating. We strive to create an environment where no family with a new baby ever feels alone or needlessly frightened by the task ahead of them.