Jodie Turner-Smith Gave Birth At Home To Avoid Systemic Racism In Hospitals
“Jodie Turner-Smith was never going to have an entirely ‘normal’ experience when it came to becoming a mother,” begins a recent piece published in British Vogue. It’s true. The 33-year-old model and actress was fresh off the heels of her breakthrough role in the controversial film “Queen & Slim” when she got pregnant, and aside from the customary red-carpet events and glitzy award ceremonies to attend, there was the unpredictable matter of a global pandemic on the horizon.
But it’s not that Turner-Smith’s pregnancy turned out to be a little bit different from what she expected. It was drastically different.
“Nobody really teaches you about what your body goes through to bring a child into the world until you’re actually doing it,” Turner-Smith wrote of her pregnancy in British Vogue’s September 2020 issue. She didn’t know, for example, that her first trimester would be punctuated by persistent nausea, fatigue, and subchorionic bleeds — a pooling of blood between the uterine wall and a membrane that surrounds the embryo — all while juggling her busy schedule shooting “Without Remorse,” her first action movie, with Michael B. Jordan.
A post shared by Jodie Turner-Smith (@jodiesmith) on Apr 3, 2020 at 12:36pm PDT
But it wasn’t just that she was busy “tearing around the centre of Berlin with tactical gear and a rifle while blowing things up,” or that she was “rushing through an airport to catch a flight back to America” that complicated the pregnancy. Once the pandemic hit and hospitals became flashpoints for COVID-19, the actress and her Canadian-American husband, Joshua Jackson, decided together that it would be safest to welcome their baby to the world at their home, in Los Angeles.
“We had already decided on a home birth, because of concerns about negative birth outcomes for Black women in America — according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the risk of...
