The DawningLife Way

Below you will find information about our practice, our team, and The DawningLife Way, in hopes to give you a more clear perspective on who we are and what we do.

• Debbie Schneider, senior midwife of DawningLife, is highly trained and experienced in homebirth. Debbie has been midwifing for 25 years and has been primary midwife at over 1000 home births. She trained extensively under the preceptorship of Constance Conn, CPM (some of you may know her as Claudia), in the early 90s and eventually the two became midwifery partners and practiced together up until Constance’s retirement in May 2019.

• Throughout her midwifery career, Debbie has loved the aspect of training new midwives and having them join her in serving the birthing families of DawningLife. The current team members of DawningLife currently include midwife:

  • Debbie Schneider, CPM & Primary Midwife

  and apprentice:

  • Toniann DeOliveira, Senior Apprentice, Primary Midwife-Under Supervision

• Midwives and apprentices work together as a team with compatible clinical and relational skills. That along with their extensive collaborative experience allows them to be able to provide a strong and consistent support system to clients while also emphasizing very intimate and highly personalized care.

• DawningLife offers a full spectrum program of Holistic Homebirth Care. This includes prenatal, labor, birthing, and postpartum care. Clients have virtually unlimited access to us over the course of our relationship.

• The statistics of DawningLife are excellent! Over the last 5 years, for instance, our transport rate has been 7% while our C-section rate is a less than 1%.

• Clients have the option to work in collaboration within a strong and supportive medical backup structure, should the need for hospital transfer arise. DawningLife would then provide continuing support, as appropriate/desired.

• Our practice is strongly based in Informed Choice. We are all about supporting you in “your birth, your way” and provide research-based information as well as the benefit of our extensive experience in guiding you to make the decisions you are truly most comfortable with.

• We believe a woman brings her entire being, physical, emotional and spiritual, into her birthing and we strive to support and honor her on all levels.

• We are very holistically and preventatively oriented. Our practice is firmly rooted in the Midwifery Model of Care. (See Below)

• We take a very time-intensive approach to care. Clinical care takes time! Providing information and answering questions takes time! Relationship building takes time too and is as important an aspect of our care as any other.

• We love waterbirth and have attended many hundreds of them, so once again we have the information and experience to support you well in this option. We are also here to guide you in whatever approach and birthing position you choose.

• As a part of our holistic approach we integrate a variety of modalities into our care. We are very experienced and comfortable with the use of herbs, essential oils, homeopathics, etc.