No Doctor, No midwife: How This Mom Had a Fearless Free Birth

Unassisted birth may sound crazy, but it’s a magical way to welcome a baby into the world.

By Jennifer Margulis, PhD

Special To BRMI

Before Karls Katz became a mother, she struggled deeply with her mental and physical health. At the time she was counting calories and living mostly on junk food—Fruity Pebbles, Oreos, and canned spinach—and using conventional beauty products. Karls, at the time—in her early twenties—was also battling an eating disorder. She remembers that she “just wanted to be skinny and liked.”

Then she fell in love with a man who—as she’d find out later—was struggling with addiction. 

Collecting baby clothes

Karls had dreamed of motherhood for as long as she could remember. At age five, she’d already decided she would have ten children.

As a teenager, she began preparing for that future—collecting baby clothes and crocheting baby blankets, storing it all in a hope chest in her bedroom. 

So when she discovered she was pregnant at 22—despite it not being planned—Karls was overjoyed. The news felt like the beginning of the life she had always imagined.

The growing tiny human inside her body made her question everything.

The minute she found out she was pregnant, Karls started researching the best and healthiest way to have a baby.

She realized she needed to clean up her lifestyle. So she stopped taking the medication for depression, stopped using toxic-laden conventional beauty and hygiene products, and started eating a healthier diet. She began filtering her water, and she threw away the ibuprofen in her bathroom cabinet.

Looking back on the difficult times she had when just out of her teens, Karls thinks the depression, and some of her other struggles, was caused by her unhealthy diet and way of living.

She wanted a home birth, her partner talked her out of it

After months of researching, Karls decided she wanted to have the baby at home. Her partner at the time thought it was a terrible idea.

“You have to have the baby in the hospital,” she remembers him insisting, “’cause you’re probably going to die if you don’t.”

Karls was sure he was wrong, but choosing a path he opposed so strongly was scary for her. She decided to follow her partner’s lead instead of listening to her own intuition.

Delighted to become a mom—finally!—Karls’ experience with this hospital birth wasn’t easy. The labor pains were agonizing. She felt clenched, blocked, constantly interrupted, and scared. She was even taken out of the birthing tub that she envisioned delivering her baby in as an alternative to her dream of a water birth at home. Even though she had a non-medicated vaginal birth, she remembers being poked and prodded incessantly.

In a vulnerable state, she consented to the breaking of her water when convinced to do so, against her birth plan. After her son was born, the midwife massaged her uterus so roughly that Karls cried out in pain as clumps of blood gushed from her vagina. 

“It was hell to fight them”

When she told the labor and delivery nurse she was not giving the baby a vitamin K injection or a hepatitis B vaccine, a pediatrician brought a group of medical school students with her to try to bully Karls into changing her mind. “It was like a pack of wolves,” Karls says. “It was hell to fight them.”

Her son Ghavin was born 14 years ago. She later gave birth to twins, River and Brookland, now 12. During the preterm labor with the twins—while completely alone in a Boston hospital—she faced relentless pressure and badgering, the stress so overwhelming that she stopped her labor herself. Most of the harsh scolding and exhaustion came after birth, when she felt utterly drained, a painful pattern that repeated with the birth of her fourth child, nine-year-old daughter Saoirse.

With three births that were far from the peaceful experience she had envisioned, Karls bore the heavy weight of shattered birthing plans—yet, she also recognized the midwife’s deep commitment to protecting her as best as possible, while navigating intense pressure from doctors and nurses. That loss of control—the unraveling of the birth experience Karls had so longed for—left a raw ache inside her, a mingling of grief and fierce longing for the gentle, empowering birth she never got to have.

After thirteen years of marriage, Karls and her husband got a divorce. Though she found out his struggle with substance abuse and dishonesty had been consistent throughout the entirety of their relationship, it was still heartbreaking to leave. Karls also felt like she hadn’t had a chance to give birth on her own terms. She had a niggling feeling that she wasn’t finished having children.

Deciding to have a free birth

Life has a way of working itself out. Karls fell in love with Tucker, a man she had been friends with for four years. She loved that he shared her dream of living on an island, and he often spoke about his vision of one day having four children.

One day, half-jokingly, Karls said to him, “If I ever have another baby...” Then, more seriously, she added, “I’m not having a baby at the hospital.” Tucker was supportive, knowing that she had always dreamed of having a home birth—or even giving birth alone in nature.

After helping Tucker move to the island, Karls discovered she was pregnant at 36, expecting her fifth child. The news brought joy, but also a flood of vulnerability shaped by her past experiences and a fear of being judged.

Throughout the pregnancy, Tucker—who had always dreamed of becoming a father—kept noticing signs that everything was unfolding as it should.

In the second trimester, while walking his dogs along the beach in a quiet, meditative state, he found himself reflecting on whether they would be having a boy or a girl, and how life’s circumstances sometimes left him feeling stuck on the island.

Then the sky transformed into one of the most breathtaking sunsets he had ever seen—brilliant shades of pink far too vibrant for that time of year. At that moment, he felt certain: they were having a girl. Wanting to share it with Karls, he called it “our sunset.”

For Tucker, that sunset was more than just a moment of beauty. It made him realize he was ready to step into this new chapter—to experience fatherhood for the first time, not as something distant or abstract, but as a life he would share alongside Karls.

Coming up with a plan

One podcast episode in particular, from the Free Birth Society, emphasized how important it is to trust the birthing mom’s instincts, allow her to birth without interruption, and let her lead the way—coming when she calls for help but not interfering, emoting, or imposing ideas on her. It made a strong impression on him.

Karls told very few people she and Tucker were planning an unassisted home birth this time. A birth with no midwives or doctors. No interference. No one telling Karls what to do. Just Karls, her baby, and her partner.

High costs, poor outcomes in American hospitals

Some 3.66 million babies are born in the United States each year, according to the CDC. Only about 1.3 percent of these births take place at home.

At the same time, the United States has one of the highest rates of maternal mortality among industrialized nations—around 19 maternal deaths per 100,000 live births in 2023 —and an ignominiously high infant mortality rate—5.5 infant deaths per 1,000 live births as well.

Though we spend more money on maternity care and birth than any other nation, our outcomes are much worse.

Between 800 and 900 women a year die during childbirth, and about 20,500 babies in America die before their first birthday.

“Hospital birth in America, usually attended by highly trained obstetricians, is subpar,” says Stuart Fischbein, M.D., a conventionally trained obstetrician with over forty years of experience who himself has delivered thousands of babies in the hospital and now exclusively attends home births.

“There’s a pervasive feeling of anxiety and fear that runs through the pregnancy world,” Fischbein says. “It’s propagated the moment a medical school student goes to school. They say really scary stuff to expecting moms. Like ‘Oh, your baby’s looking big,’ or ‘Oh, your hips are really small.’

“Why would you ever say that to a pregnant woman?” Fischbein says. “They’re projecting their anxiety, vomiting it on to the pregnant woman. Don’t plant these seeds of doubt in these women because you fear birth,” Fischbein insists. “We need to change all that.”

Unassisted, or “free,” birth

It’s difficult, if not impossible, to estimate how many women in America choose unassisted birth.

Unassisted or free birth, which it’s sometimes called, usually only makes the headlines when it’s unplanned—though it's estimated to account for only 0.35 to 0.38 percent of U.S. births.

Just last September, striking doorbell camera footage captured a California mother unexpectedly giving birth outside her home when her water broke as she attempted to get to the hospital. 

Three years ago, an unconventional free birth captured global attention. Several videos posted on Instagram, which quickly went viral, showed a 27-year-old woman with dreadlocks free birthing her son in the ocean in Nicaragua with no medical assistance.

Sarah Schmid is a German woman who had nine unassisted births. Over 17,000 people have watched an interview of her recounting her free birth journey. For Sarah, birth is sacred and sovereign; something that should be done guided by instinct, not intervention.

Karls’ free birth: “I can’t put it into words how unbelievable and magical it was”

Determined to give birth on her terms this time, even though she was already a mother of four Karls says she wasn’t convinced that she was in labor. She was working as a driver for Uber and Lyft and decided to sign into the app. But when she drove to Main Street in East Falmouth, Massachusetts, she realized she wasn’t motivated to work.

Instead, she called Tucker and asked him to go for a power walk. Mosquitoes feasted on them as they walked along the beach.

Karls felt crampy.

Though she was starting to feel really uncomfortable, they went to the Airbnb that Tucker’s mom was renting to open some last-minute baby gifts.

Excited to meet her first grandchild, Tucker’s mom didn’t know her son and his partner were planning to have the baby at home. Unassisted. And they weren’t about to spill the beans.

With sand still between her toes, Karls drove herself home barefoot in her sun-bleached burgundy Honda Pilot. As soon as she was in her own space where she could fully relax, she felt waves of contractions hit her. She lay down in the bedroom while Tucker took the dogs for a walk and started inflating the birthing tub.

Relaxing in the bathtub

In the meantime, Karls relaxed and labored in her bathtub, which she’d filled with warm water, bentonite clay, Epsom salts, and borax. She leaned over the edge of the tub, lifting herself onto her elbows to relieve the pressure.

She felt completely in her body.

There was no stress. No clenching. No gritting her teeth to get through it.

In fact, she was in such a deep state of relaxation that she went to sleep after every contraction.

She never made it to the birth tub that was squished into the bedroom–the room.

she felt safest in her home. 

In the middle of her pregnancy, when she decided definitively she wanted a free birth, Karls gave herself a single goal: to find her way out of fear.

She decided she wouldn’t be affected by anyone else’s emotion. She would release her fear and society’s, and have a fearless pregnancy and a fearless birth. Listening to podcasts from the Free Birth Society, which she made all her customers do with her while driving for Uber and Lyft, helped.

“She just slipped out”

In the bathtub, relaxed and in the flow, Karls was so connected with her body, and the idea of a soul coming through this portal, that she felt almost euphoric.

This time the sac holding amniotic fluid broke on its own with a gentle pop. Right afterwards she could feel the head. She knew her baby was about to be born.

As the head emerged she supported it with both hands and began speaking encouragingly to the baby as she had been doing herself which lasted about 7 minutes.

She leaned her arms on the side of the tub and lifted her right leg. At the same moment that the baby was born, Karls reached down into the water, twisted her body in the tub so she was facing forward, and pulled the baby gently to her chest.

Karls says birthing her felt like becoming an inter-dimensional being. She felt so deeply connected to the baby that she could almost hear her responding in vibrations.

Even though the baby weighed eleven pounds one ounce, “she just slipped out,” Karls says.

“During the birth, at some point, I told the baby she has to do it, I can’t do it anymore, she can do it, she has to turn,  she has to come out,” Karls remembers. “And then she did. It was just so magical.”

Moments after the birth, in one of the best displays that year, the Perseid meteor shower graced the sky with shooting stars.

A baby named Kachina

Karls is Passamaquoddy on her father’s side, and Cherokee on both her father and mother’s side.

During her pregnancy she’d wanted to connect more with nature. So she decided to spend time in the woods. One day, while visiting St. Croix, where Tucker had been living for a time, Karls stumbled upon a baobab tree at the foot of a hill.

“I remember hugging it and saying to the tree, ‘What do you think I should name this baby? Feel this baby in my womb and tell me,’” Karls says.

“I stepped down from the tree and I saw a little doll with a felted wool head with seed beads woven into it and a tiny drum at its side,” she continued.“It wasn’t until later that I learned what a Kachina doll was—despite how well-known they are in Western Native American culture—and I had no idea about them when we chose her name: Kachina. Kachina is a Native American name. It means sacred or spiritual dancer. The tree told me what to name her. Just as I’d requested.

”Kachina turned two in August. She has a mop of blonde hair, blue eyes, and a determined way of doing things.

Her favorite sentence: “Kachina do it! Myself!” For Karls, birthing Kachina was life-changing.

“It was void of fear, without any restrictions,” she says. “It was completely free.” 

About the author:Jennifer Margulis, Ph.D., is an award-winning health journalist and a frequent contributor to BRMI. A sought-after speaker and Fulbright grantee, she has worked on a child survival campaign in Niger, West Africa; appeared live on prime-time television in Paris, France; and taught post-colonial literature to non-traditional students in inner city Atlanta, Georgia. Her work has been published in the New York Times, the Washington Post, and on the cover of Smithsonian magazine. She has published eight books, including Your Baby, Your Way, which was a finalist for the Books for a Better Life Award. Read more about her at www.JenniferMargulis.net and consider becoming a free or paid subscriber to her Substack newsletter, Vibrant Life.

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