About

BOTH&BIRTH by Hearthwell LLC integrates offerings of pre-conception and prenatal education, birthwork, relational wellbeing, nourishment, and more. Join me in cultivating (w)holistic wellness of self, community and planet!

Jessalyn Ballerano (she/they), BA, CCCE, CLE, SMC-CD
Educator, Birthworker, Advocate, Writer

Both&Birth reflects the idea of “both/and”, or the complexity of multiple truths, instead of “either/or” absolutes, in the realities of human reproduction today. How can we tap into our still-ancient physiology while navigating the daily demands of a lifestyle unfamiliar to our ancestral biology? How can one person’s safe haven be another’s danger zone? How can we honor our deepest desires for ourselves and our loved ones, and carry them into a deeply flawed health care system designed to put profits and efficiency over client-centered care?

Perhaps most importantly, when it comes to birth – how can we reach across the boundary of pregnancy, and integrate the reality that reproductive health IS life-long human health? The moments that precede and follow birth are just as important as the moment a new child enters the world. Both&Birth centers education and supportive tools for physiological understanding, lifelong self-advocacy, and continuity from the moment you conceive of parenthood into toddlerhood.

Why birthwork?

Because as a humanitarian, potential birth-giving person, and researcher, I learned that…

We need one another’s help, especially in the realm of reproduction and health.

As a young college student, I saw a headline about the soaring Cesarean section rate in the US – this was around 2008, and I was shocked to learn that an entire 30%+ American births were ending in surgery. Studying anthropology, I was both fascinated and appalled, and decided to take a deeper dive, research and writing my Honors Thesis on the processes and power dynamics of hospital birth over recent decades.

My research only invigorated me to get more involved, so after graduation I took a cross-country train to California (yes, like an idealistic, starry-eyed dreamer) and started immersing myself in birth, midwifery, pregnancy and perinatal learning.

What I found was that despite the incomparable funding that goes into medical research, training and technology, the U.S. has some of the worst infant and maternal mortality rates among Western developed nations, Injury and trauma are at unacceptable levels, and disparities in many preventable outcomes continue to disproportionately impact global majority families of Black, Brown, Indigenous and Immigrant Americans.

Due to the historically oppressive culture of the medical business establishment, families and providers alike face systemic racism, gender-based violence, and all manners of discrimination in moments that should be the most sacred and protected.

And because I believe in solutions.

Namely, the power of culturally humble, trauma-informed client-centered community care for pregnant and parenting people.

Doulas are a fantastic stop-gap in addressing some of the challenges of American maternal/parental and infant health care. Yet even as a doula – I would love to see a world in which this profession was not so needed.

All of my work aims to contribute to a society in which all pregnant people have access to dignified, accessible, appropriate, equitable care.

That’s why I do work broadly across public education, midwifery advocacy, traditional birth cultural learning, and systems-level advocacy. If you’d like to learn more, or collaborate – get in touch!

Human reproduction is at once a physiological process and a cultural one. I offer learnings from over a decade in direct services, more than 15 years of study, and a lifetime of attuning to the simplest birthrights of being human.
Jessalyn Ballerano, Founder

Jessalyn (she/they) is a certified SMC Full-Circle and Shiphrah’s Circle Community Doula, a CAPPA-Certified Childbirth Educator, and Milk Magic Lactation Educator. She was a Renaissance Scholar at the University of Rochester, where she completed an Bachelor of Arts Degree in Anthropology with Honors. She is a lifelong advocate, activist and learner, and has resided in upstate New York, the Bay Area of Northern California, and Eugene, Oregon.

See more details of Jessalyn’s training and birthwork experience here.

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