About Us
Our Team
Building relationships with the people we serve is a top priority so we keep our practice small. You can rotate visits between both providers or you can primarily schedule with just one or the other, whatever tends to work best for you! We want clients to have the chance to get to know their birth team so they can feel comfortable and confident when the day of the birth arrives.
Erika started the practice and has been providing community-based midwifery care in South Central Minnesota since 2009. Rebeccah joined the practice in 2020 from a birth center in another state.
Erika Urban, CPM, LM
Midwife and Owner
Rebeccah Hazel, CPM, LM
Midwife
A birth assistant's role is to assist the midwife during labor, birth, and postpartum. Our birth assistants are trained in emergency skills and are certified in Neonatal Resuscitation and CPR.
Juana Arias
Birth Assistant and Admin
Chloe Nordquist
Birth Assistant
About River Valley Birth Center
River Valley Birth Center is unique. Minnesota statute 144.615 defines “birth center” as: “a facility licensed for the primary purpose of performing low-risk deliveries that is not a hospital or licensed as part of a hospital and where births are planned to occur away from the mother’s usual residence following a low-risk pregnancy.” There are 8 licensed birth centers in the state, 3 are located in Greater Minnesota, and River Valley Birth Center is the only birth center located in southern Minnesota.
River Valley Birth Center is licensed by the Minnesota Department of Health and accredited by the Commission for the Accreditation of Birth Centers. When a birth center is accredited by the CABC they are held to the highest standards for safety, transparency, accountability, quality improvement, and patient care. CABC accreditation requires extensive reviews and site visits to make sure we are fulfilling every indicator for compliance while providing evidence-based midwifery care.
While birth centers and their staff come in all shapes and sizes, we adore being one of the smallest accredited birth centers when it comes to the size of our staff! We enjoy getting a chance to get to know our clients really well and provide them with continuity of care. By limiting the number of clients accepted into care we are able to provide the highest quality of care to each family we serve. Our midwives are both Certified Professional Midwives and licensed by the Board of Medical Practice. CPMs are specifically trained for community birth, providing care in birth centers and home.
Our History
River Valley Birth Center was started in 2014 by Erika and Joe Urban.
Erika started providing midwifery care in South Central Minnesota in 2009 after moving to Saint Peter from NE Wisconsin. For the first 5 years of practice in Minnesota she focused on community birth in the context of home birth while simultaneously working towards opening a freestanding birth center. It took 4 years of careful planning and hard work from the time she went to a birth center planning workshop until the doors of River Valley Birth Center were open and licensed. This time required a lot of spreadsheets and budgets, research about zoning, meetings with city officials, property searches, big risks, and a lot of renovations. The first babies born at RVBC arrived in July 2014.