Actress and model Jodie Turner-Smith welcomed her first child this past April with her husband, actor Joshua Jackson.
Being in the final trimester of pregnancy comes with its own struggles, but Jodie also had to manage preparing for her little one’s arrival during the beginning of a pandemic. At the end of March, Joshua shared on Live with Kelly and Ryan that he and Jodie were trying to figure everything out during quarantine and managing stress. The couple spent a lot of time together playing games, he shared.
The couple are known for being private about their lives and relationship and that’s been no different since their daughter arrived. The only post either have shared the featured a glimpse of their daughter was on Mother’s Day when Joshua posted a tribute to his wife.
Now, Jodie decided to share her inspiring birth story with British Vogue. She shared that each stage of her pregnancy faced challenges, from shooting an action moving to dealing with COVID and the pain surrounding the black community after George Floyd’s death. Through all of it, Joshua remained by her side. She shared, “Both of us had watched our own mothers struggle to raise children without such support. Both of us were determined to create something different for ourselves. He kept saying to me, ‘There’s no part of this that I’m going to miss.’ And there wasn’t.”
Most importantly, her husband remained faithfully by her side during her home birth. The model opted to deliver her baby girl in the couple’s Los Angeles home. She labored for four days in their home and recalled a moment on the morning of the third day, “My husband and I shared a quiet moment. I was fatigued and beginning to lose my resolve. Josh ran me a bath, and as I lay in it contracting, I talked to my body and I talked to my daughter. In that moment, he snapped a picture of me. An honest moment of family and togetherness – a husband supporting a wife, our baby still inside me, the sacred process of creating a family.”
Prior to the devastation caused by COVID-19, the couple had made the decision to have a home birth. They made this decision, “because of concerns about negative birth outcomes for Black women in America — according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the risk of pregnancy-related deaths is more than three times greater for Black women than for white women, pointing, it seems to me, to systemic racism.”
Their decision became rooted as news regarding how hospitals were handling birth during that stage of the pandemic. Many support people weren’t allowed in the hospital with mothers, for example. Jodie shared that, “delivering at home ensured that I had what every single woman deserves to have: full agency in determining my birth support.”
We’re so happy for Jodie that she was able to have a birthing experience that was so beautiful as she grew her family and we’re thankful to her for sharing her inspiring story.
Kate Fann (she/her) is the BabyNames.com celebrity blogger, as well as an established content writer, aspiring author, and social media expert. She has been featured in online publications such as Bolde, ManoByte, Medium, The Social Observer, and more. Kate has ghostwritten numerous romance novels and is currently working on publishing her own works in the Young Adult genre.
Kate lives in East Tennessee with her husband Casey and her two sons, Quinn and Noah. When she's not writing or scrolling Instagram, Kate can be found tasting delicious wines, playing with make-up, baking yummy treats, or hiking the beautiful Smoky Mountains.
