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

About The Birth Pause

Chloe searched for an existing podcast to share this story and couldn't find one that felt right. Most birth story podcasts offered long, linear play-by-plays from start to finish. What she wanted was something different — interview style conversations with the families she's attended, blending their lived experience with her clinical insight, told together, in each other's presence.

The Birth Pause explores birth not as a medical event but as a spiritual and personal transformation. Each episode asks not what happened, but what it did to you.

Hosted by Chloe Campbell — licensed midwife, founder of Supernatural Midwifery, and someone who has sat at the threshold with hundreds of families across New York City. This is not a play-by-play. This is the story underneath the story.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In this episode of The Birth Pause, midwife Chloe Campbell sits down with Nora just weeks after a home birth, to revisit the labor from the inside out. What she'd expected to be an 18-hour labor stretched into 36, moving in the "spiraling" pattern Chloe describes — contractions tightening and loosening in waves rather than climbing in a straight line, partly, they suspect, because Orly had been breech earlier in pregnancy and needed to negotiate her way into position. They trace the turning points: a breakdown into sobbing that let go of tension she hadn't known she was holding, an hour on nitrous oxide that softened the edges without touching the sensation itself, and a shift in company mid-labor — one support person's steady presence giving way to a friend's playful energy — that Nora ties back to something she calls her "mother wound." They talk candidly about what labor actually felt like against the online narratives that frame birth as blissful or psychedelic, why she chose a home birth not out of fear of hospitals but a wish to keep things as uncomplicated as possible, and the disorientation of pushing without quite letting herself anticipate meeting her baby. It closes on the birth itself — her partner catching Orly, the first cry, and what it meant to become a mother on her own living room floor

About The Birth Pause

Chloe searched for an existing podcast to share this story and couldn't find one that felt right. Most birth story podcasts offered long, linear play-by-plays from start to finish. What she wanted was something different — interview style conversations with the families she's attended, blending their lived experience with her clinical insight, told together, in each other's presence.

The Birth Pause explores birth not as a medical event but as a spiritual and personal transformation. Each episode asks not what happened, but what it did to you.

Hosted by Chloe Campbell — licensed midwife, founder of Supernatural Midwifery, and someone who has sat at the threshold with hundreds of families across New York City. This is not a play-by-play. This is the story underneath the story.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In this episode of The Birth Pause, midwife Chloe Campbell talks with Dana, a mother of three, about the arc across her three very different births — a first birth in a hospital and two subsequent home births with Chloe. Dana settles on a title for her own story, "Evolving into You," and traces how each birth reflected where she was in her life: a rushed, under-supported hospital birth with her son Hunter, where she now recognizes the pain she felt was as much environmental and emotional as physical; a fast, disorienting second labor with her daughter Bani, aided by a serendipitous visit to an elder acupuncturist who told her simply that she was "thinking too much"; and a long, 36-plus-hour third labor with her son Baz, which she came to trust as inevitable rather than uncertain. They talk about the talismans that carried her through — a crystal held during her first birth, hand-drawn birth cards taped to the wall for the other two, a borrowed birth stool with its own long history — and about the strange, unhurried moments home birth makes possible, like her older daughter wandering in to breastfeed mid-labor. The conversation turns to why hospital-trained obstetricians so rarely get to witness physiologic birth: a medical education front-loaded with emergencies and worst-case scenarios that Chloe argues quietly dehumanizes both the process and the people in it. Dana reflects on how leaving home to labor is itself a kind of intervention, and how staying, across all three of her births, let her keep following what her body already knew.

About The Birth Pause

Chloe searched for an existing podcast to share this story and couldn't find one that felt right. Most birth story podcasts offered long, linear play-by-plays from start to finish. What she wanted was something different — interview style conversations with the families she's attended, blending their lived experience with her clinical insight, told together, in each other's presence.

The Birth Pause explores birth not as a medical event but as a spiritual and personal transformation. Each episode asks not what happened, but what it did to you.

Hosted by Chloe Campbell — licensed midwife, founder of Supernatural Midwifery, and someone who has sat at the threshold with hundreds of families across New York City. This is not a play-by-play. This is the story underneath the story.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

About this Episode

Episode one of The Birth Pause begins where this podcast was born — an Instagram post, a repost, and a birth story that refused to be anything less than what it was: extraordinary.

When Chloe shared a birth story on social media, it was reposted by another provider with a caption calling it horrifying. The family and Chloe chose not to engage in the comments. Instead they decided to let the story speak for itself — in full, in their own words, on their own terms.

Helen's birth

Helen arrived at home, as planned. What followed in the postpartum period required a transfer — a NICU visit and ultimately a NICU stay that was clinically indicated, appropriate, and navigated with intention and care by everyone involved. Far from a homebirth that fell apart, this is a story of homebirth functioning exactly as it should — providing physiologic labor and birth at home, then accessing hospital care precisely when the clinical picture called for it. The best of both worlds, preserved without compromise.

In this episode:

• The Instagram post that started it all
• Why Chloe and the family chose silence over the comments section — and what they chose instead
• Helen's homebirth and the postpartum transfer
• The NICU stay — what led there, what it looked like, and why it matters
• What a well navigated transfer says about the safety and integrity of homebirth
• The origin story of The Birth Pause itself
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Connect with Chloe:

Supernatural Midwifery

supernaturalmidwifery.com

@supernaturalmidwifery

About The Birth Pause

Chloe searched for an existing podcast to share this story and couldn't find one that felt right. Most birth story podcasts offered long, linear play-by-plays from start to finish. What she wanted was something different — interview style conversations with the families she's attended, blending their lived experience with her clinical insight, told together, in each other's presence.

The Birth Pause explores birth not as a medical event but as a spiritual and personal transformation. Each episode asks not what happened, but what it did to you.

Hosted by Chloe Campbell — licensed midwife, founder of Supernatural Midwifery, and someone who has sat at the threshold with hundreds of families across New York City. This is not a play-by-play. This is the story underneath the story.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.