Elsa Waldman, CNM

Elsa joined the Lifecycle team on July 4th, 2023!

Elsa is a second-generation midwife who was born at home in rural Tennessee.  She has “immense gratitude to my midwife mother Jeanne and all the Hopewell midwives who helped me find my path to being a midwife.”  Elsa completed her BSN and MSN at the University of Pennsylvania in 2009.

Prior to midwifing, Elsa worked in family planning, public health and abortion care. Prior to Lifecycle,  she worked as a midwife at a community hospital in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where she attended waterbirths and facilitated Spanish Centering groups. For the last decade she worked at several academic teaching hospitals in Philadelphia (Hahnemann and Jefferson) where she trained OB/ER/Family Medicine residents and cared for diverse clients at many of the city’s health centers.

Elsa feels that is it is “a complete honor to accompany humans through the intense and vulnerable experience of having a body (and perhaps a pregnancy and birth) and all the messy and joyful spaces in between”.  She feels deeply grateful that she gets to do this work and “I continually learn so much from my clients.”

She has lived and volunteered in Spain, Mexico, Nicaragua, Haiti and Honduras, working alongside community health workers and traditional midwives. She speaks fluent Spanish.

In her free time, she enjoys foraging, gardening and swimming in all bodies of water.  She has 2 children :  “my first taught me about letting go of control and my second taught me about VBACs.”