Model Gigi Hadid has revealed that she opted to give birth to her daughter at home, enduring a 14-hour labour at her farm in Pennsylvania, so she could have her family by her side.
“What I really wanted from my experience was to feel like, okay, this is a natural thing that women are meant to do,” she said in an interview with Vogue.
The 25-year-old celebrity talked about how her and boyfriend Zayn Malik’s plan was to have their first child together at a New York City hospital. However, due to COVID-19 restrictions, she would not have been allowed to include mother Yolanda and sister Bella in the birth experience.
Hadid said she and Malik decided on a home birth after watching the documentary ‘The Business of Being Born’.
“We both looked at each other and were like, I think that’s the call,” Hadid said.
“I knew it was going to be the craziest pain in my life, but you have to surrender to it and be like, ‘This is what it is.’ I loved that,” she added.
Hadid said she used an inflatable bath to give birth in.
“There definitely was a point where I was like, I wonder what it would be like with an epidural, how it would be different,” Hadid added. “My midwife looked at me and was like, ‘You’re doing it. No one can help you. You’re past the point of the epidural anyway, so you’d be pushing exactly the same way in a hospital bed.’”
Hadid didn’t realised she had delivered her daughter because she was so tired.
“It didn’t even click that she was out,” she said. “I was so exhausted, and I looked up and [Malik is] holding her. It was so cute.”
In January, Hadid casually broke the news of her baby’s name by subtly changing her Instagram bio to say “Khai’s mom.”
The model and her singer boyfriend have kept the baby’s face out of their social media posts. Hadid’s long-time partner Malik, 28, announced the baby’s arrival on September 24, 2020.
“Our baby girl is here, healthy & beautiful... (T)o try put into words how I am feeling right now would be an impossible task. The love I feel for this tiny human is beyond my understanding,” the former One Direction member tweeted.
Hadid and Malik have had an on and off relationship since 2015.
