Jennifer Brandon Ruiz LM, CPM
Licensed Midwife

Born in Northern Minnesota, Jennifer was raised on a wild and frozen patch of land just South of the Canadian Border. The first birth she witnessed was that of her sister, Cassandra. Jennifer was eight when Cassandra was born at home, accidentally, after an astonishingly quick labor. The sound of her brand new baby sister in her mother’s arms on the couch never left her. By the time Jennifer was 21 she had given birth to her first daughter, Aurora, at home supported by midwives. And she knew that the rest of her life would be devoted to guiding women through their births. Two years later she caught her first baby. She was with her best friend in a candle lit room, during a particularly cold Minnesota January, a couple of hours before dawn. And she knew that she had found her life’s work. Jennifer attended the University of Minnesota, earning a degree in Women’s Studies. She went on to attend National Midwifery Institute for her Midwifery education. Licensed in California in 2011 Jennifer has been a partner in a busy home birth practice in Northern California before moving to Los Angeles where she worked at several premier birth centers before joining LA Midwife Collective. She has helped over a thousand women give birth in homes and hospitals and birth centers and yurts and on blankets under the stars. Jennifer has also welcomed her son Ellis in 2014 and Liza Jane in 2016, both with midwives. In the summer of 2020, in a month filled with heat and tears and fear and love, Jennifer also came to know pain and grief as she held her daughter Liza Jane as she died, following a tragic accident. She learned that the words “I love you I love you I love you” can be used in the beginning and in the end. Jennifer chose to take her fierce grief and to love it and to let it help her while she is by the side of the families who invite her to be with them in their pregnancies and during their births and for as long as she is needed. Jennifer and her family live in a light filled house at the edge of the mountains, within reach of the ocean breeze.