In this episode of The Birth Pause, Angel takes us through the two births that split her life into a before and after. The first, her daughter Ruby's, was a 45-hour labor that led her to an epidural, pitocin, and a vacuum-assisted delivery — and to the doula who would change the direction of her life. The second, her son Odin's, was meant to be an unassisted birth at home, until a phone call brought an ambulance, then police, into the most vulnerable hour of her life, and her son arrived within minutes of reaching the hospital, with almost no one she'd planned on there to see it. Angel speaks openly about fear, force, pleasure as a coping tool, the loneliness of co-parenting after birth with someone who didn't share her reverence for it, and the strange gift both experiences gave her: an authenticity and body trust she'd never had before.
Trigger warning - This conversation includes explicit language, explicit ideas, a traumatic ambulance/police encounter, and references to past pregnancy termination and hyperemesis gravidarum
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