Mandy Moore is rolling with the punches during her pregnancy.
The 36-year-old This Is Us actress is currently expecting her first child with husband Taylor Goldsmith, a baby boy due any day now, and in a new episode of Informed Pregnancy Podcast, she tells host Dr. Elliot Berlin why she had to scrap her original plans for a natural home birth.
"We were very intentional and excited about this prospect of being at home for the birth. I was like, 'Taylor, I want you to do a playlist, but also I want you to have the guitar on too, ready to play,' " she recalls. "We were really excited about what the whole experience was going to be."
Moore says they found "fantastic" doulas and midwives to help them and "felt so immediately sold on this team that we had assembled, and from very early on in pregnancy, had them both on this journey with us."
The singer also explained that she hadn't known anything about home births prior to watching the 2008 documentary The Business of Being Born. "I'm not opposed to Western medicine at all, but I definitely like to consider a more holistic approach, probably first and foremost," she says.
But due to a health concern relating to a drop in her platelets, which she revealed on Instagram earlier this month, she now has to forgo a home birth.
"My platelets have been dropping throughout pregnancy and it's something I never thought about until I got, I'd say early to midway through my third trimester, they sort of started dropping pretty precipitously and fell below the threshold that would make it possible for me to do a home birth," explains Moore.
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While a drop in platelet count during pregnancy is normal, if they drop below the normal range, it's known as a condition called gestational thrombocytopenia. According to the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, the condition is common and occurs in between 7 and 10 percent of pregnancies at delivery.
Moore says realizing that she couldn't have a home birth temporarily made her envious of other moms who could.
"Unfortunately my plans have had to change. I initially was like, 'I got it, absolutely. I am malleable, I'm going to do whatever it takes for this baby,' and that is absolutely how I still feel. But the grieving process about my plan not unfolding the way that I had hoped actually, I felt this sort of delayed reaction," she says. "It was a couple of weeks afterward that it really sort of sunk in."
"Just caring about other people that were planning to do home births and feeling this weird tinge of jealousy," continues Moore. "I know that sounds ridiculous, but I'm like, 'Oh man, I'm happy for them, but I'm also kind of sad that I don't get to have that experience that I was hoping for.' "
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Moore says their current birth plan is "to labor at home, and then at a certain point in early active labor to go to the hospital and actually have the wonderful opportunity to deliver with a midwife at a hospital, which I know is not the normal experience."
"I feel like, at the end of the day, I'm kind of getting the best of both worlds," she says of the hybrid birthing plan. "Very grateful to still have the midwife component to my delivery."
"I'm incredibly grateful and, yes, things didn't unfold the way that I wanted, but I say, that is the ultimate lesson of life and parenthood and the next chapter that we're about to venture into," adds Moore. "I'm really leaning into that and leaning into the idea of surrender and things are going to unfold exactly the way that they're supposed to. And I trust that and I trust my body and I trust my team and I'm more or less just excited."
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