Sarah Tunney

Sarah Tunney is a licensed midwife who runs a private midwifery practice in Solana Beach, opened in 2023 after she came back to Southern California. She has worked as a professional birth worker for ten years and has advocated for maternal, infant and reproductive health for close to three decades. Before midwifery, she taught Middle East and Islamic studies as a historian until 2010, and worked as a doula in Connecticut and New York City for five years. She served as a community midwife for the Amish in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania. In 2022 she relocated to Strasbourg, PA, to build advanced skills under a midwife who specializes in breech and twin births. She also apprenticed with a traditional midwife, a partera, in Tijuana, Mexico, whose free clinic and birth center serves pregnant migrants and asylum seekers. She served on the board of Refugee Health Alliance, which supports that clinic, and has worked as a Medical Parole (MPP) coordinator for families seeking asylum. Her training is wide-ranging: she has learned from midwives in the UK and Iceland, mostly in low-resource settings outside the US, and has carried out maternal and infant health research or primary work in Jordan, Syria, Egypt, Tunisia, Lebanon, Mexico and Guatemala. She works as a clinical researcher in maternal, infant and reproductive health. She is a member of the Quality Maternal & Newborn Collaborative Research Alliance, which is affiliated with Yale University, and is an active member of the California Association of Licensed Midwives.