Corinne Card had been hoping for a home water birth when it was time to deliver her youngest child, but when doctors expressed concern that her bump wasn’t as big as they’d like, it looked like those hopes were going to be dashed.
The new plan a hospital birth – with a pool if Corinne, 41, was lucky and they weren’t all in use when the time came.
However, it seems baby Freddie had other ideas.
In the end as, in a roundabout sort of way, he gave his mum the birth she wanted – albeit not exactly as she’d planned.
Most home water births happen in a birthing pool with a midwife or two present to help things go smoothly and safely. But in Corinne’s case, the baby arrived way too quickly for any of that to be possible, so she had to make do in the bath on her own while her husband Jon, 45, frantically tried to get help on the phone.
‘Looking back, it was a very strange experience, and I was incredibly lucky that nothing went wrong,’ mum-of-three Corinne tells Metro.co.uk.
‘It was a straightforward birth, and it was easy, too, in the sense that I didn’t have to go to the hospital and deal with the kinds of procedures and rules I’d gone through with my two other children.’
The pregnancy was pretty similar to Corinne’s previous two – apart from the pandemic, which, by the time Freddie was born in October 2020, was going strong.
Corinne, from Brighton, missed out on enjoying the outdoors as even walks on the beach became impossible.
‘I couldn’t sit down and have a break as all the benches were covered in yellow tape, and all the toilets were closed.
‘When you’re pregnant, it’s hard to go very long without those things.’
She was also disappointed that a water birth could be off the table completely after she’d had a good experience with it when delivering her second child, Zoe, eight.
‘I felt more in control, I think because I like being in water,’ she said. ‘I feel happy and comfortable there, and I love swimming.
‘It definitely took the edge off the pain too.’
The day Freddie arrived, Corinne, who’s also mum to Harry, 11, felt what she at first thought were Braxton Hicks contractions – false labour pains – while on the afternoon school run.
‘But as I got up the hill we live on, I felt them getting stronger,’ recalls Corinne.
‘I called the midwife when we got home, and she said not to worry and to take a bath as the contractions were too far apart.
‘She said it would make me feel relaxed.
‘So I took two paracetamol and got in the bath. But after I got in, it got really intense.’
It was 3:30pm when Corinne got into the water – which she found took the pain of the contractions down to a level that ‘wasn’t unbearable’.
Little did she know that, by 5pm, she’d be holding her new son in her arms.
‘Jon was still on Zoom calls when I got in,’ she recalled, ‘because we didn’t really expect the baby to be coming right then.
‘But then when it got more intense, I told him I probably needed his help.
‘He called the midwife again, and they said: “No, don’t worry, the contractions are still too far apart”.
‘They kept getting more intense, but they were still far apart.
‘I was shouting. By 4pm, I said: “I think the baby might be coming”, but the midwife still said that definitely couldn’t be.
‘One of them said to put me on the phone so they could hear a contraction, as I was being so loud.
‘He did, but my contraction then got stage fright or something, because it didn’t come out very loud, so I understand why she thought I was still fine.
‘When another contraction came, a neighbour actually came to the window to ask what was going on – they must have thought there was a fight or something.
‘It was really dramatic.’
Corinne decided she wanted to try to check for herself how dilated she was, to give the midwives a better idea of how far along her labour was.
‘I put my hand out, I could feel the head,’ she says. ‘I knew there was no going back.
‘I told Jon, who phoned the midwife again, and she said it was time to call the paramedics.
‘This meant he was on yet another call to the paramedics, while I remembered from the other births, and from TV shows like Call the Midwife and One Born Every Minute, that the baby gets in trouble if it stays too long in the birth canal.
‘I was worried that it was going to take too long for the paramedics to get here, and thought that if the baby really wanted to come, I should let it.
‘I remembered that you should wait until a contraction comes and do a little push, and that’s what I did on all fours in the bath.
‘Then I felt the head coming out, but I looked down to see this white translucent ball with purple veins across it. I didn’t understand it – it was quite disturbing.’
Corinne later realised this was Freddie’s amniotic sac, as her waters had never broken.
She says: ‘It was so bizarre and surreal.
‘I had no pain relief other than the two paracetamol.
‘But at the same time, it was very exciting.
‘I was thinking in each moment: “What can I do to keep it safe?”
With her next contraction, Corinne gave one last push and Freddie was born – and free of the sac.
‘Having been swished through the bathwater,’ Corinne says, ‘he was actually quite clean.
‘Jon jumped in the bathroom all excited because the paramedics were on their way.
‘At that point, all he’d known was that I could touch the head and suddenly there was this baby crying.
‘He’d kept coming back in trying to help, but he wanted to get a professional to be with me.
‘He was tied up talking to them, so when the baby was born I was completely alone.
Thankfully, both Freddie, now nearly two years old, and Corinne were completely healthy, despite the small bump worries – he was simply born on the smaller side and has since grown to match his peers.
Corinne still doesn’t know why this birth was so different to her other deliveries, but the experience has made her feel braver in her everyday life.
‘I felt different afterwards,’ she explains.
‘A couple of days later, we needed to get the car out of the drive and my husband said: “Are you sure you’re alright doing this?”
‘I thought to myself: “I’ve delivered my own baby. Yes, I can also back the car out of the drive”.
‘Everything feels like that now.
‘I don’t think it’s a good idea, I think you should have medical professionals there when you give birth, but it made me feel quite empowered about everything else.’
Because she technically did get her home water birth in the end, Jon asked Corinne one day if she thought she, on some level, made Freddie’s dramatic arrival happen herself.
To us, she says: ‘I don’t know if I had any influence on it.
‘I didn’t want to do it on my own. I did want a water birth at home, but mostly I wanted the baby to be safe.
‘They told me he ought to be delivered in hospital, so I wouldn’t have chosen that.
‘At the same time, it was lucky as I didn’t want to go to hospital and in the end, I didn’t have to go at all.
‘That felt great to just be at home. Also, again, quite surreal.
‘Nothing big had apparently happened, I didn’t go anywhere – suddenly we just had a new baby there, ate a chicken dinner and watched a film.’
Corinne writes about her experience giving birth at home in her book Parenting Tips Your Mother Didn’t Tell You – An A-Z of Parenting in the Digital Age.
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