Hi, my name is Allise Penning. I’m a grateful birth center parent and current Board President of Our Community Birth Center.
I am currently in my second trimester and have received my care from Our Community Birth Center for all three of my pregnancies. The first pregnancy went very smoothly and I was fortunate enough to have the birth experience of my dreams at Our Community Birth Center. My beautiful child Poppy was born in the birth center’s birthing tub in 2023. My partner, Jordan, and I felt that we got to enjoy the best of both worlds between a home birth and a hospital birth. Our baby was born in a welcoming, comfortable, homey environment that helped us feel at ease and avoided the stressful and impersonal nature that a hospital setting can sometimes involve. At the same time, we got to enjoy the confidence of knowing that we were benefiting from the skills and expertise of AlexAnn and the rest of the team, who are all total pros. After laboring at home just the two of us, it was an immense relief to show up at the birth center and know that we were in the hands of grown-ups who actually knew what they were doing, unlike us.
My second pregnancy, unfortunately, resulted in a loss due to a genetic difference that couldn’t have been avoided. The pregnancy loss was very difficult. During a phone call about my next scheduled appointment, I said that I wasn’t sure if I would need it since the pregnancy had ended. Within a couple of hours, I received a phone call directly from AlexAnn, who told me that Our Community Birth Center wasn’t going to let me disappear from their care during this experience. She performed a home visit after my loss, answered my many questions promptly through the Spruce app, provided me with links to reliable information, helped connect me with resources for emotional support, and scheduled follow up appointments to attend to my general health.
In both of these cases, on opposite ends of the spectrum of how I had hoped my pregnancies would go, I received high quality, respectful, compassionate and empowering care from Our Community Birth Center. I’m an enthusiastic person who has a tendency to gush or sometimes be hyperbolic for effect, but I can say without exaggeration that there is not a single additional thing that I wished the birth center had done for me in either of these situations. And that’s because they just did it all. They took care of me.
I’ve spoken to many other birth-giving parents in our community and it’s sometimes infuriating or even horrifying to hear about the care they’ve received right here in the Eugene-Springfield area. During a time when health care and reproductive health care in particular are under attack, I’m so grateful to have access to Our Community Birth Center, where I’m treated as a whole human being with value, where I’m empowered to participate in my medical care and decision-making, where practices are grounded in both evidence and the recognition that different things work for different people and situations, and where access to high-quality, humanizing medical care is treated as a right of the many instead of the privilege of a few.
I could go on and on about the other services my family and I have benefited from, such as Baby Clinic, lactation support, and primary care; or the many services that Our Community Birth Center provides to community members, including gender-affirming care, contraception, childbirth and newborn care education, fertility support, and more. Suffice it to say, the birth center is doing many different and amazing things to support individuals and families in our community, increase inclusivity, and reduce health care injustice. Our Community Birth Center has given me hope about what health care can look like.