‘My family thought I was crazy’: More women are choosing to give birth at home

The Wall Street Journal – Tuesday, February 3, 2026
By Sara Ashley O’Brien

Before Ivey Cross was ever expecting, she was glued to TikTok videos of women describing their experiences of giving birth at home.

Twenty-five weeks into her own pregnancy, she decided to do so herself. She took an online home-birthing class, watched YouTube videos, reached out to midwife practices to assemble her care team and hired a doula.

“My family thought I was crazy,” Cross, 28, said.

The decision would be likely to come with a higher upfront price than insurance-covered hospital care, but she wasn’t happy with her OB-GYN’s office and had doubts about the hospital setting being right for her. In October, she gave birth to her son at her home in Atlantic Beach, Fla.—an experience that left her with lingering trauma for weeks.

Home births are on the rise among women who feel dismissed by or skeptical of the medical establishment. Romanticized stories, including ones shared on social media, are a gateway to birth plans that these women say are more natural and aligned with their values. While still rare, home births are ticking up for women who are moved by powerful, positive anecdotes.

“I would rarely, if ever, get a patient in their 20s,” said Abigail Vidikan, a midwife who supports home births in Los Angeles. “Now I’ll get a handful, generally driven by social media.”

While home births were once the province of counterculture hippies, Los Angeles doula Rebecca Richter said she’d been hearing from women of all walks of life “who desire more than the system is giving them.” Richter said that the pandemic, from vaccine requirements to restrictions on public life, had fueled distrust in doctors and resulted in many moms—often the medical decision makers in their homes—deciding to diverge from public-health guidance.

Vanessa Fitzgerald, 39, said she and her partner watched the 2008 Ricki Lake documentary “The Business of Being Born” when they were thinking about starting a family together. “After watching, we were like, Why wouldn’t we have a home birth?”

Fitzgerald, who lives in Los Angeles and gave birth in 2025, paid roughly $20,000 for her birth team: Vidikan as her midwife, a backup OB-GYN and a doula, none of which were covered by her insurance plan. “Nobody in-network would agree to support a home birth,” she said, adding that she wanted a doctor who would support her decision rather than shame her. She and her partner have since gotten some insurance reimbursement for the OB-GYN costs but are still fighting for reimbursement of the midwifery care.

The percentage of planned home births nationwide ticked up in 2020, from 1% of overall births to 1.3%. In 2023, the most recent year for which there is data, 1.5% of births were planned home births. In recent years, high-profile women including fashion designer Aimee Song, supermodel Elsa Hosk, and actresses Nikki Reed and Hilary Duff have all shared their stories about giving birth at home. Last month, dancer Derek Hough and his wife raved about their recent home birth. “We had candles everywhere, beautiful music playing,” Hough told People magazine.

The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists says it believes hospitals and accredited birth centers are the safest settings for childbirth. The organization has said that planned home births are associated with fewer maternal interventions, like labor induction or cesareans, than planned hospital birth—a major talking point among women who opt out of hospitalized birth. There has been a significant increase in cesarean section deliveries in recent decades, which made up 32.3% of deliveries in 2023, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Home births are also associated with higher risk of perinatal death, the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists says. It recommends that those opting for this path can minimize the risk by selecting the right care team.

“You can have a very safe and wonderful birth in a home setting, just like you can have a very safe and beautiful birth in the hospital, too,” said Los Angeles OB-GYN Phabillia Borja, whose practice supports home births. “The truth can be said on both sides, so it’s about the team you choose.”

Some home-birth advocates speak in extremes about how the medical system treats pregnant women today. “Pretty much everything that’s done to a pregnant woman from the moment she has that positive pregnancy test until she brings her baby home in the car seat from the hospital is antithetical to nature’s design,” said Dr. Stuart Fischbein, a longtime OB-GYN now retired from delivering home births. He remains an influential voice in the home-birth movement with his podcast “Birthing Instincts” and its Patreon community.

“I know that doctors are pretty good at treating problems, but they don’t have much to do about preventing them,” said Fischbein. The criticism aligns with the ethos of the Make America Healthy Again movement, but the movement has yet to openly rally around home births.

On social media, where people typically share their highlight reels, home births are described as sacred, transformative and empowering. The painful, and sometimes scary, parts of the process are often overshadowed by successful birth, leaving viewers with a rosy portrayal of the experience.

“The majority of moms I knew, it was the way they were giving birth,” said author Amber Rae, 40. She was living in Los Angeles when she was pregnant, and the idea of fewer interventions and more control—over lighting and music and other conditions at home—appealed to her. So did the promise of immediate, uninterrupted bonding with her baby.

At 20 weeks, knowing her pregnancy was low-risk, she stopped going to her OB-GYN and transferred her care to a midwife. But after 25 hours of laboring at home, including five hours of pushing, Rae, then 38, was transferred to the hospital where she had an emergency cesarean section. After her son was born, Rae was hemorrhaging. Had she stayed at home, she’s not sure she would have survived. Still, she supports anyone who wishes to have a home birth.

Cross, the Floridian who gave birth in October, said she felt like her back was breaking during contractions and begged to go to the hospital for an epidural. She said she was falling asleep in between contractions, and her husband kept shaking her, fearing the worst for her.

“He felt helpless that he couldn’t do anything to help me. I felt helpless because I felt like I didn’t have a choice anymore,” she said. “I put myself in that position. I definitely probably need to go to therapy for that.”

Cross said after her baby was born she was given a shot of Pitocin to stop her from bleeding. She had trouble sleeping after her baby was born because she had flashbacks. While she had filmed the birth experience, she has yet to publish a vlog, or video blog.

“For me, being raw and real and honest is like my top priority and it is a very, very vulnerable video and it is very animalistic,” she said. It felt important, she said, not to be “another person that is showing only the good parts.”

“I don’t think people are 100% honest on social media about their experience,” Cross said. “Or, they just had a very, very, very different experience than I had.”

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