MEET ALIYA (she/her/hers)
Aliya, with Koby, the very first baby she supported earthside.
Aliya with her family
Aliya (uh-leah) Caler, MS is a California certified nurse-midwife (CNM) and certified women's health nurse practitioner (WHNP-BC) as well as a registered public health nurse (RN). She holds current certification in Basic Life Support and Neonatal Resuscitation. Aliya is a midwife, an abortion provider, a mother of two kiddos (born at home in Brooklyn and San Francisco), and a fierce advocate for listening to your gut -even when and especially when it might feel scary.
Aliya with her midwifery sisters she trained beside
Aliya was trained in the hospital setting attaining a Masters in Science at the University of California at San Francisco (UCSF) and has attended births and provided prenatal, postpartum and sexual health care in the home setting, San Francisco General, Kaiser, UCSF, Lyon-Martin and Planned Parenthood. In these spaces Aliya has been able to care for and learn from families diverse in race, class, ethnicity, sexuality and gender expression, and from an amazing team of strong, skillful midwives, obgyns, nurses and nurse practitioners. These experiences inform her homebirth practice.
She holds a master in public health (MPH) from Columbia University where she examined sexual and reproductive health at the population level and graduated phi beta kappa with degrees in politics and sociology from Brandeis University. She has spent time working with community based organizations in Seattle, San Francisco, Oakland New York, Tanzania, Malawi and South Africa to understand the roles we all have to play in filling in the gaps to the broken sexual and reproductive health care landscapes within our own communities.
She comes to midwifery by way of a background in policy, community organizing and disease prevention and health promotion research. After attending her first home birth in East Harlem in the Spring of 2011 she knew she had finally found her way home. Homebirth is a calling and she was so delighted to have heard the message loud and clear.
Before opening Birthing Adventures Midwifery, she worked as a birth and abortion doula in NYC, training with DONA (2010) and The Doula Project (2011). Additionally, she worked with the By My Side Birth Support Program, a program of the New York City Department of Health, aiming to provide support to pregnant people living in the poorest zip codes in Brooklyn, a precursor to medicaid covering doula support in New York state.
In 2012 she became a certified lactation counselor (CLC), training with the Center for Breastfeeding and specializes in working with parents who choose hypnobirthing as a modality to cope with the transition of carrying a life and ushering new ones earth side.
Aliya has been attending births since 2010 and is honored to have supported hundreds of families during pregnancy, birth and the postpartum. For the past two years Aliya was in a joint practice with licensed midwife Kara Schamell.
