In this episode, Chloe sits down with Caitlin Dougherty — birth and postpartum doula, IBCLC student, and cardiac ICU nurse — to revisit the homebirth of her son, Owen, almost exactly a year to the day after it happened.
Caitlin shares how her first birth, a hospital induction with her daughter, became \"the beginning of my breakup with the medical industrial complex\" — not a rejection of medicine, but a reckoning with its overuse and hierarchy. She traces that hierarchy back to its military roots, and talks about what individualized, narrative-centered care gave her the second time around.
The conversation moves through the specifics of Owen's birth: a suspected breech presentation earlier in pregnancy, an unmistakable summer thunderstorm the night before labor took hold, involuntary pushing that stretched on longer than expected, and a small, unplanned ritual — fixing a broken toilet paper holder — before things intensified.
Throughout, the two return to a central thread: the difference between medical authority and moral authority, the loss (and possible return) of spirituality in medicine, and what it means to surrender to a process you can't fully control — one contraction, one choice, at a time.
*MENTUM ANTERIOR is the only type of face presentation that can happen vaginal. This way around the baby's spine is also in the anterior orientation. When the spine is stacked behind the sacrum posteriorly, that is not anatomically possible
","author_name":"Chloe Campbell"}