Welcome to the Free Birth Podcast, a supportive space for people who are learning,

exploring and celebrating their autonomous choices in childbirth.

Together, we'll unpack truths, share personal stories,

and claim our ability to birth freely and intuitively. Here's your host, Emily Sal day. Today on the show we have Eileen from North Carolina with quite the story to share.

From losing a premature baby to hospital interventions as a teenager,

Eileen went on to experience both a traumatic abortion

and then an abusive hospital birth

with her first live child.

Finally, with just her husband outside at their home,

she free-births her daughter, drumming the night away

as she labored, fully claiming her body, her baby, and birth experience. All together I've been pregnant seven times. My first pregnancy I was 16

was going through this whole, that thing when you're like a teenager and you're like

I want to be a mom and like really bad and I wasn't careful,

wasn't being very careful.

I was just kind of like hearing about like,

you know, natural family planning type of stuff but I didn't I

really didn't know anything about it and so I got pregnant and suffice to say my parents were not thrilled.

My dad is a marine so you can kind of roll with that very OCD controlling type personality and I I knew right away that I already wanted to have a natural birth.

I wanted to have a home birth.

My grandma had my dad in the hospital and then she had my two aunts at home.

And my dad was 71 born in North Dakota, you know, they had the big drape where she couldn't even see

between her legs, they shaved her, forced her to have an enema, like took the baby away right

...