About Us

Nannette Jenkins earned her Bachelor's of Science in Nursing from Shepherd University in 2004. She has practiced as a RN in her community in many different specialties including women's and maternity health, ICU, family practice, and home health. She also periodically teaches clinicals for nursing students at Shepherd University, Shenandoah University, and Mountain State University. 

 Nannette has been interested in midwifery ever since nursing school when she had the awesome privilege of delivering two babies with a midwife in my community. She started midwifery school in 2007 and earned her Master's of Science in Nursing with a concentration in Midwifery from Shenandoah University in 2010. She continued to work full time as a nurse in labor and delivery and also in long term care while earning her master's degree. 

Her training included three distinct phases. She precepted with a Certified Nurse Midwife in Northern Virginia who provided well woman care, family planning, and STD care to women in the public health departments and during that time she cared for hundreds of women of all ages and socioeconomic backgrounds, both with and without insurance, both English speaking and Spanish speaking. Nannette has also precepted with a Certified Nurse Midwife in Lancaster County, PA, who provided home birth services to the Old Order Amish community. This was a busy practice and gave her very good experience in providing homebirth care. This experience also solidified her desire to offer homebirth services full time when she graduated, and she will always be grateful to her preceptor for this rare experience.  

During the summer of 2009, she attended a midwifery workshop at the Farm in Summertown, TN, and had the wonderful experience of meeting Ina May Gaskin and Pamela Hunt, two midwives who have an amazing amount of knowledge to impart concerning midwifery. This experience also developed her understanding of and relationships with Certified Professional Midwives who provide the majority of homebirth care in the United States.

After completing her time in Pennsylvania, she precepted with a group of Certified Nurse Midwives in Washington County, MD, and completed training at Washington County Hospital. In this high-volume, high-risk environment, she learned how to evaluate women for almost any problem of pregnancy, and attended hundreds of women for well-woman care, prenatal care, labor and delivery care, and postpartum care. 

 Becoming a resource for the women she lives amongst every day is very important to her, and part of Nannette's goals with Riverside Midwifery is not only to provide a safe and legitimate option for birthing, but also to improve the health and independence of her community's women through education, general midwifery services, and promotion of personal responsiblity and informed choice. Nannette believe that you have not been given a real choice if you haven't been given all the choices, and she hopes to stand with her fellow midwives in the effort to make sure her community's women have the education and resources available to them to truly make their own choices in the amazing and life-changing event of the birth of their children.

Nannette's foundation to her philosophy of midwifery is her belief in Jesus Christ as God, the Bible as His Word, and the individual man and woman as physical and spiritual beings with eternal souls. Her belief is that life is therefore sacred and respect the autonomy of the individual. She acknowledges and increasingly appreciates the role God has given women as capable and powerful individuals who have incalculable influence on their families and communities. She believes that life begins at conception and regards conception, pregnancy, birth, and parenthood to be some of the most miraculous experiences God has made part of life.