Jodie Turner-Smith welcomed a baby girl with husband Joshua Jackson last April.  However, delivering her newborn was an incredibly frightening experience.

Appearing in British Vogue’s September 2020 issue, the Queen & Slim star opened up about her difficult pregnancy along with the real fears she developed as her due date crept closer.

In Turner-Smith’s essay, she expressed, “We had already decided on a home birth, because of concerns about negative birth outcomes for Black women in America.”  

Their decision was based on factual evidence provided by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, as the actress noted, “The risk of pregnancy-related deaths is more than three times greater for Black women than for white women, pointing, it seems to me, to systemic racism.”

Turner-Smith further revealed that her pregnancy was plagued by nausea and fatigue, admitting, “Nobody really teaches you about what your body goes through to bring a child into the world until you’re actually doing it.”

As it turns out, being pregnant was the easiest part as her labor lasted nearly four days.

“Early in the morning on my third day of labour, my husband and I shared a quiet moment. I was fatigued and beginning to lose my resolve,” she recounted. “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.”

Turner-Smith says when her daughter inevitably starts asking questions about the year she was born, the actress explained, “I think I will tell her that it was as if the world had paused for her to be born.”

By Megan Stone
Copyright © 2020, ABC Audio. All rights reserved.