Jodie Turner-Smith Pens British Vogue Essay About Her Home Birth

Source: David M. Benett / Getty

Jodie Turner-Smith and Joshua Jackson are definitely one of our favorite Hollywood couples, so we were thrilled to learn the ‘Queen & Slim’ star had penned an essay about her birth experience for British VOGUE.

In her essay, Turner-Smith reveals her first trimester was a rocky one, marked by constant nausea and fatigue as well as subchorionic bleeds, none of which kept her from filming the upcoming action movie, Without Remorse, alongside Michael B. Jordan.

“God knows what my baby thought was happening, because I spent most of that trimester either on set, tearing around the centre of Berlin with tactical gear and a rifle while blowing things up, or rushing through an airport to catch a flight back to America to promote Queen & Slim,” Turner-Smith writes.

Talk about a supermom. Jodie also describes her husband Joshua Jackson’s devotion throughout her pregnancy and labor.

“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.” That extended to the couple’s home birth, which saw Turner-Smith laboring for nearly four days in their Los Angeles home. “Early in the morning on my third day of labor, 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.

The image that Jackson snapped appears alongside Turner-Smith’s essay, revealing her in the bathtub with her head tilted back and eyes closed as a candle with beads of water and sweat dotting her face and breasts. Turner-Smith also shares that the couple “decided on a home birth, because of concerns about negative birth outcomes for black women in America”. She points to statistics from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which put the risk of pregnancy-related deaths at more than three times greater for black women than for white women – stats that Turner-Smith believes reveal systemic racism in the American healthcare system. Add to those numbers, the changes that were made at hospitals during the pandemic, many of which began restricting who could be present in the birthing rooms.

“Delivering at home ensured that I had what every single woman deserves to have: full agency in determining my birth support,” Turner-Smith wrote.

Those changes were just a few of the many to occur this year, a time of enormous flux, which Turner-Smith describes in the essay as well, revealing how she and her husband have been savoring their daughter Janie’s first months of life, while also marveling at the world they brought her into:

“Sometimes I wonder how I will explain to my daughter what it meant to be born in the year 2020. The historic events, the social unrest, and me – a new mother just trying to do her best. I think I will tell her that it was as if the world had paused for her to be born. And that, hopefully, it never quite returned to the way it was before.”

Beautiful words from a beautiful person. Janie is definitely blessed to be born into such an incredible family. We’re guessing the baby will be dripping in Gucci baby clothes soon enough too, if she’s not already.

Jodie Turner-Smith new Gucci Bloom campaign was revealed at the beginning of this month. Check out the stunning ads below: