Even after having two kids, Eva Amurri admits that she’s nervous about the upcoming birth of baby number three. That’s very understandable for any mother, and especially for the actress and lifestyle blogger, who has experienced miscarriage and who just split from her husband, Kyle Martino, late last year. In a blog she wrote this week, she shared her fears and how she’s working to make her baby’s birth as comfortable for herself as possible, which means not having Martino present.
“Birth is so emotional, and so I knew early on that having Kyle there wasn’t going to feel right to me,” Amurri, who is 37 weeks pregnant, wrote on her site, Happily Eva After. “Our intimacy level has totally changed now that we aren’t a couple, obviously, and in order to really let go and allow labor to progress (especially with a Home Birth) it’s so important to feel completely at ease in your body and support.”
While she’s excited for her third child, and for seeing daughter Marlowe, 5, and son Major, 3, welcome another sibling into their lives, she’s also feeling “bittersweet” about this stage of her pregnancy, she wrote. Though this time she knows what she’ll need to care for a newborn and isn’t worried about not having enough love for him, she admitted to feeling like she missed out on the beauty of this pregnancy.
“But I know that the part of all of this that I have the most fear surrounding is something that I have to do completely on my own: bringing my son into the world,” she wrote. “As much support as I’ll have (and I’m lucky to have some incredible people supporting me), birthing a baby is something you do alone — in your own body and with your baby.”
For this home birth, Amurri plans to surround herself with “strong female energy.” That means female midwives and a doula, as well as some mom friends. She’s also going to have Marlowe and Major there.
“I’m excited for them to witness the miracle of birth for the first time, and to hopefully take that experience with them forever as they grow into adults as well,” she said.
If Martino disagreed with Amurri about her decision to bar him from her delivery room (in this case, her home), it’s unclear whether he would have the legal right to be demand to be there. A judge in New Jersey ruled in 2014 that a mother had the right to ban the father of her child, to whom she was not married, from the delivery room.
“The court further finds that it would be an undue burden on the mother to require her to notify the father when she is in labor or require his presence during labor,” Passaic County Superior Court Judge Sohail Mohammed wrote in his ruling. “It would invade her sphere of privacy and provide unwarranted strain on the mother.”
In 2016, a woman in Staten Island got an emergency court order to ban her estranged husband from the delivery room. But even happily married women might want to keep their partner’s away from the process, if their presence would be harmful to their state of mind. Unfortunately, this isn’t yet settled law.
At least in Amurri’s case, everyone is on the same page.
“Kyle will, of course, meet his son directly after he’s born (and we both feel good about this decision),” she wrote, still sounding bittersweet about her situation. “I’m really hoping I can lean into the comforts of my experience as a seasoned birthing mama in the next couple of weeks, instead of allowing it to intimidate me.”
Speaking of childbirth, these photos show the real beauty and strength of that incredible process.
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