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 Chelsea from Idaho who shares her journey of

birthing her first two children in birth centers to go on to free birth her

next two babies at home.

Chelsea shares her wisdom on how she chose to fiercely protect the privacy of her

birthing choices.

We talk about how Chelsea went through every labor stage

prior to her final birth of her daughter and achieved a painless birth experience. I grew up very like Western medical, did everything that way.

My husband grew up everything not medical.

His mom had a traumatic experience

after he was born and basically was told that she would figure out how she could heal herself and then he's

the fifth of seven so the last two were born at home with midwives. The other ones were all hospital births and so when I married

him she kind of started chiming in randomly about that and I was like, no way, epid the way I'm not doing the pain and then it's something sunk in and I kind of started researching it

Before we got before I got pregnant I got pregnant like five months after we got married and

then we went to an OB for the first appointment and didn't meet the OB and the nurse practitioner

told me I had asked her if I was going to meet the OB in that appointment.

She said no, you'll have four different doctors,

you won't know which one is going to be at the birth.

And I thought, okay, this is really not comfortable.

I'm not even meeting the doctor and they are all going to just kind

...