Asian Birth Story: Homebirth in Texas
- Asian Birth Collective
- Apr 29
- 9 min read
Catherine is Vietnamese-American and has lived in Houston, TX most of her life.. She’s a yoga teacher, birthworker and the parent of two children.
"Since the midwives hadn’t made it to the house yet, my doula coached me through breathing exercises to help curb the urge to bear down and push.. There was no way I could stop though, I felt the head lower down. The fetal ejection reflex was uncontrollable.. My midwives arrived. The baby came out, sack intact."
On Identity
When I think about my identity, I divide my relationship with it into different phases. In my childhood, I felt very, very Asian. I grew up speaking Vietnamese, and spending time with my Vietnamese family. At school, I was always differentiated for it, and always hearing compliments that were actually just microaggressions.
When I reached early adulthood, I really just wanted to push my Vietnamese identity away. I embraced my proximity to whiteness. I didn't look in the mirror a whole lot, most of my friends were white-presenting people, and I saw the benefits of that. I didn’t like it when people asked me where I was from, and I did what I could to make it feel like I just belonged.
The last phase, the one I’m in now, was to acknowledge the harm that has been done to me, and the harm I’ve done to other people and participated in, as well. It’s been a very healing process and it’s brought me back to my Asian identity. I'm not embarrassed about my Vietnamese heritage as much anymore. I'm much more open to talking about my beliefs, heritage and culture now. I’m also learning more about my culture and heritage and eager to pass it on to my children.
I’ve also been acknowledging the harms that we do to each other within our own culture, and how that affects pregnancy, birth, and postpartum. We uphold so many patriarchal beliefs that are rooted in fear, not the truth. For example, bodily autonomy gets lost within our culture, which is something that I talk about when I teach yoga to students and other teachers. I’m passionate about addressing the harm and struggle we experience, as well as the beauty and strength within our culture.
Pregnancy, Choice and Bodily Autonomy
My pregnancy was very smooth. I love being pregnant. I joke all the time with my friends: how can I be pregnant again, but not give birth or take care of the child? I love feeling the movement of the fetus inside of the uterus. I love the feeling of experiencing the growth. I loved my bodily changes. I loved talking to my baby when she was in the womb, which is something I was afraid to do during my first viable pregnancy because of the nearly constant worry of miscarrying again.. I know that I’m in the minority here but it’s just truly a magical experience.
As soon as I found out (I was pregnant), I did a lot at once: I started searching for my birth team, started paying attention to my sugars since I had gestational diabetes with my first, but my partner and I also started thinking about whether I should get an abortion because we didn’t know for sure if we could handle another baby emotionally, physically, or financially.
Ultimately, we decided to have the baby for a few reasons. I’m usually a very practical person but I’d also been having these vivid, visceral dreams of giving birth before I even knew I was pregnant. It was so strange, but I really felt like I was meant to have this child, like she was here to teach me something. I still don’t know the reason, but I do know I’m so happy. It’s stressful, being a mother of two, I feel like my body is a tense ball, but I’m really happy.
I also needed a chance to do things differently with my second baby. I needed a healing experience and even though it’s weird for me to acknowledge that I was doing things based on dreams and intuition, I just knew that this birth and postpartum would be healing.
One consideration that was stressful at the time, was we knew that Roe, and access to abortion care in Texas, was likely going away any day at that point. We were worried about getting into a situation where I would have to fly out of state to get an abortion, and how traumatic and financially challenging that would be.
We ultimately made our decision based on intuition but the political environment did put pressure on us and made it feel like I needed to move quickly in order to make sure that it still felt 100% like a choice I was making.
Between my first and second births, what I was most focused on was keeping my bodily autonomy. In my first birth, my midwife demanded she check me even though I didn’t want her to, because I was GBS positive and I didn’t want her to break my water and raise my risk of contracting an infection. But while I was already having contractions, she said that if I didn’t let her check me, I was going to have to look for a new midwife.
So in my second pregnancy, I started looking for my midwife 24 hours after finding out I was pregnant. I interviewed her and gave her a bunch of scenarios and asked about how she would respond, all related to bodily autonomy. She checked all my boxes.
I was also much more intentional about my sugar intake even during the beginning stages of my pregnancy which ended up helping with my milk production later as well.
I also had done very little planning and thinking about postpartum care after my first kid and was thrown into a deep postpartum anxiety, which affected my relationship to myself, my family and my baby. So for this pregnancy, I focused on getting educated and making a plan for postpartum. Lactation was extremely stressful with my first baby. I dived deeply into lactation education regarding nursing and pumping and hired a lactation consultant, one for latch assistance, and a second lactation consultant specifically for pumping in my first trimester with my second baby. I also interviewed postpartum doulas to help me in the early newborn weeks. I was determined to not drown in postpartum feeding anxiety like I did with my first baby.
Labor
I was 41 weeks, definitely past my due date and it was my midwife’s policy that I go in for an additional ultrasound to make sure baby and fluid levels were fine. I was feeling really comfortable, I hadn’t had any contractions, and in my last pregnancy, I went to almost 42 weeks, I knew that I just give birth late.
The afternoon after that appointment, I took my everyday walk with my husband around our neighborhood. When we came home and nothing else happened until midnight, when I was hand expressing colostrum and I started feeling contractions. Over the next couple of hours, the contractions start to increase in frequency and intensity. Around 1 or 2 a.m. my husband wanted to call the birth team but I said not to because I figured I’d be doing this for a while. Around 3 a.m., contractions do start getting a bit more regular so he texted them at that point.
In my mind, I was not worried about them showing up at all. I knew I could just give birth by myself. I wanted to be by myself, keep things quiet for as long as I could. There were way too many people in my house for my first birth, it stressed me out.
Morning came, I’m having contractions. It’s a normal school day and my daughter came down and told me to make sure to get her out of school early if I was going to give birth. She really wanted to be present. I promised her, and after she left, I spent the morning cleaning the house, washing pump parts, getting things together. Our birth photographer was convinced I was going to give birth and she didn’t want to miss it so she came that morning. Some of my favorite photos are of our messy kitchen, my husband and I doing normal house things, joking around and laughing in the midst of him helping me through my contractions, She documented just how amazing our relationship is.
By 1 or 2 PM, I was really feeling my contractions. I was using Spinning Babies techniques to keep moving and switching positions as things go too painful to bear. After my daughter came home from school, my contractions were on top of each other so my husband called the birth team and they started to head over. I’m so glad my doula made it, I needed an outside party to show me empathy and give my daughter and husband a break at that point. I remember during my first birth how exhausted and scared I was during the pushing stage that I wouldn’t have the energy to push her out. It was the hardest physical work I’ve done in my life. During my labor with my second baby, I expressed to my doula my fear about being too exhausted to push her out. I tried to rest as much as possible on my side in bed in between upright standing positions to help open my pelvis open. After a while, lying down on my side caused contractions to become stronger and longer and closer together. The contractions in a side-lying position became nearly unbearable. I decided to labor in the dining room so that I could be in an upright position, not lying down, but be able to rest by leaning my head on some pillows on the table. I got some relief, but soon after, sitting became unbearable as well. Now there was no position that gave relief.
My doula tried to get me to walk across the house from the dining table to the birth tub but on our way there, in the den, I leaned over the couch and stopped talking. I needed to push the baby out, I couldn’t even try to control it. Since the midwives hadn’t made it to the house yet, my doula coached me through breathing exercises to help curb the urge to bear down and push.. There was no way I could stop though, I felt the head lower down. The fetal ejection reflex was uncontrollable.. My midwives arrived. The baby came out, sack intact. The midwife pinched the sack to break it, the water gushed out, she caught the baby and examined her. My baby was so peaceful, she didn’t cry when she emerged.
I remember standing at the couch and feeling this big sense of grief because I felt like I was in too weird a position to be able to hold my baby, but then the midwife handed her to me and I was just overcome with so much emotion. It felt like she trusted me with my baby, and it was this validation that I am capable of taking care of her.
We didn’t know the sex until I held her so I just sat on the couch with my husband and my older daughter crying tears of joy and met our baby. It was so healing and cathartic, everything I’d dreamt of. I hemorrhaged a little so they gave me a shot of Pitocin in my thigh.
All in all, it was a beautiful birth because people really respected my boundaries and my personal space. I never felt crowded. I told my entire birth team what I wanted, who I wanted there and my rules and everyone was great about it.
Postpartum
My postpartum felt so different than with my first since I prepared so much. I still had postpartum anxiety but I didn’t feel like I was thrown into a deep, dark abyss since I forced myself to call people over to my house to help me. I ended up not making enough milk for my child, just like with my first, but I’d made sure to have donor milk on hand and was able to supplement. I bled a lot, but this time I knew that I’m a heavy bleeder and didn’t worry about it. I just wasn’t as scared, which I think helped me recover faster both physically and emotionally.
The beliefs about birth from my grandmother’s generation had some unhealthy things I needed to unlearn. In modern Vietnamese culture, it’s actually very common for birth to be medicalized. We’ve lost our connection to the old culture and the old traditions, like consuming the placenta, babywearing, and breastfeeding and so from that I learned what not to do. But our culture also deeply values family. Blood is strong. We do things not just for ourselves, but for the greater good of our family, and I took that and brought it into my decision making for birth and postpartum.
For example, cosleeping — I know it’s very frowned upon here but I slept with my mom, it was so common in our family, and it feels so healthy and like a special bonding experience as long and the child and parent want it. It’s really important to all of us that I be with my baby throughout the night. A lot of my friends judge us for it, but it totally works for me and our family . My husband and I have much less time for alone time with each other, but we find small moments in our day to make time for connecting with each other. We accept that it's a sacrifice we’ll make in these early years because we want our baby to have this exclusive time with me.
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