Gloria Squitiro is mostly a stay at home mom. She has been married to her adorable husband Mark for over 25 years. To date, their greatest joy and blessing in life have come from raising their children Tara, 19 and Andrew, 14. (Luckily for those reading this, we are having a good "teen" day, otherwise, Gloria just might take the medication that her clients don’t have a need for while in labor. This is all in jest of course, but you’ll know what I’m talking about soon enough – those little babes of yours will grow up too!)

Gloria’s fascination with pregnancy began shortly after high school when living in the beautiful mountains of West Virginia. Something about being around nature twenty-four hours a day sparked her interest in natural childbirth. She talked, read and enjoyed her friend’s pregnant bellies long before she ever dreamt of starting a family of her own. But once she did, she knew that the most meaningful experience would come from having a natural birth.

To her great shock, everything she read did not prepare her for having her first birth by cesarean section. At the time, she trusted the reasoning given her - that it was impossible to safely deliver a 10 pound baby naturally. After she conceived her second child, she began to doubt that diagnosis. She knew her grandmother had delivered a sixteen pound baby, but she was from Italy, so everyone thought the numbers got mixed-up in the translation! But then she remembered that she herself was a nine pound baby, and her mother had no complications with delivering naturally, so what’s one more pound?

So, out went the flowery little books and in came the textbooks, journal articles and statistical analysis about all aspects regarding pregnancy and childbirth. Before she knew it, a teacher was born. Gloria’s philosophy towards birth stems from her personal experience with her own births and from the births of her clients. She believes that couples must educate themselves if they want the best chance to achieve the type of birth they are desiring. Gloria views herself as another resource for her student’s personal quests - providing them with information from both the medical model and the midwifery model of childbirth. She feels that by combining the best from both worlds leads to true holistic medicine.

As an instructor, Gloria makes no judgement about what her student’s births should look like because she doesn’t believe there is a right or a wrong way to give birth. Every family’s needs and desires are different. Her only goal for her students is that they educate themselves while pregnant so they make decisions that they won’t regret after the birth of their baby.

Ninety-three percent of the time, Gloria’s students achieve a non-medicated birth. Not because they have a higher tolerance to pain, but because they have learned how to make labor tolerable without medication. Fewer than ten percent of her students have a cesarean section - the local rate is over twenty-six percent.

Gloria started BirthWays in 1991. She received her certification to teach through the Bradley Method of Natural Childbirth^® and her Doula Certification through ALACE^®.