Dr Stapleton has been a midwife since 1983. She is founder and former director of Reading Birth & Women's Center, a freestanding birth center, and a hospital-based midwifery practice, both in Reading, Pennsylvania. During her 25 years in clinical practice, she attended birth center, hospital, and home births. She has been a strong advocate of collaborative relationships between families, community birth providers, and hospital providers as critical in the provision of quality maternity care.

Dr Stapleton received her undergraduate degree from The Ohio State University, her Masters of Science in Nursing from Marquette University, her certificate in midwifery from the University of Medicine & Dentistry of New Jersey, and her Doctorate of Nursing Practice from Frontier Nursing University. She has served on the board of directors of both the Commission for the Accreditation of Birth Centers (CABC) and the American Association of Birth Centers (AABC). including serving as President/Chair of both organizations. She has also served as a Site Visitor for the CABC and Research Committee Chair for AABC. In that role she headed a task force to develop the AABC Perinatal Data Registry, an online data registry for collecting data on community birth care and outcomes. The registry has been in continuous use since 2007 and contains nearly 200,000 unique courses of care in freestanding birth centers and alongside midwifery units.

She has contributed to a number of research projects on community birth, including serving as Data Coordinator for the AABC federally funded Strong Start for Mothers and Newborns Initiative. She has been a contributing author on multiple research papers reporting community borth outcomes and the potential role of birth centers and midwives in improving perinatal outcomes in the United States.