HOME SWEET HOME BIRTH FOR AISLING
Soap star wouldn’t change single thing about son’s delivery
FAIR City’s Aisling Kearns has told of her experience of having a home birth, saying she always felt uncomfortable in hospitals.
The actress, who played Maria Purcell on the RTE soap, welcomed son Tommy with her partner David Fennell in October.
The Tiktok star was initially hesitant but came round to the idea after a conversation with David’s sister-in-law, who is a doula.
She said: “She had mentioned it pretty early on in the pregnancy, but I was like, ‘No way! Maybe if I had another baby, but not with the first’.
“She talked about some statistics and differences between hospital and home births but I was still like, ‘No, I don’t think so.’”
Aisling ended up reading more into home births and after a conversation with a midwife she decided it was the most suitable option for her.
She told the Everymum podcast: “I knew that it’s what I wanted to do. For a lot of people, they’re thinking that they want to have the option of pain relief.
“I knew that if I needed to go to the hospital or get pain relief, that I could go.
“It’s not a thing that’s spoken about or offered to you when you become pregnant. You don’t have to go to the hospital, but your brain just thinks that’s where you go to have your baby.
“We are conditioned to think that it’s the safest place to have a child. But before there were hospitals, women were doing it.
“I just don’t find hospitals comfortable. I’ve never felt comfortable in a hospital.”
Detailing the experience of labour, Aisling told of how she didn’t feel scared and was totally supported by two midwives.
She added: “I had complete support around me all the time telling me I was
well capable of doing it. I had my wobble, everyone does. My midwife encouraged me.
“I was 8cm dilated and exhausted. At that point, I was like, ‘ring the ambulance and get me in for the epidural now!’
“But I moved upstairs into the bathroom and got into the zone. I had my birth pool downstairs, so I was in there for about two hours but I just couldn’t get in the zone.
“The contractions were coming on top of me and I didn’t feel like I had control.
“Next thing we knew, we were in the bedroom and he was being born a half an hour into pushing.
“I put it down to a home birth that my labour was short.
“I was only in active, intense labour for four hours. All the right hormones were pumping at the same time.”
But Aisling did end up needing hospital assistance as she had issues
with her placenta and her baby boy was born with jaundice, which she said was “terrifying”.
She added: “I did have to go to hospital for a manual removal. We ended up needing to be there because Tommy had jaundice, so I try to look at the positives. It’s good that we were there because he could get checked.
“He had light therapy, so he ended up being in hospital a lot for the first week of his life.
“I had to stay in the hospital for three nights and then I was home for one or two, and then we had to go back in again for more light therapy. It’s just crazy. It’s so busy in there. It’s terrifying.”
But she added that she has no regrets about her decision to have a home birth and would do it again. She added: “There wasn’t anything about it that I’d change.”