Hello and welcome to Gossip Time, a weekly guide to the stars by Allie Jones. I’m out on maternity leave, but today I’m bringing you some celebrity gossip via the parenting podcast world.
In the lead up to giving birth to my second baby, I revisited one of the strangest but most revealing podcasts available today: the “Informed Pregnancy” podcast with Dr. Elliot Berlin. Have you heard of this guy? He is a “prenatal chiropractor” — yes, that’s a thing — who is plugged into the woo-woo home-birth parenting world in LA that intersects with a fair number of celebrity moms. I can’t tell you anything about his services, but I do recommend the podcast, which has become one of the most under-the-radar venues for celebrity gossip over the past few years.
I have not personally ever been interested in a home birth (and was not a candidate for one anyway — I had polyhydramnios at the end of both pregnancies and needed to be in the hospital), but I love listening to all kinds of birth stories. They reveal so much: What the person’s romantic relationship is like, how they view the medical establishment, what kind of parent they desire to be, and sometimes even what they eat in a day or what the layout of their house is like. These episodes are gold! Even though Berlin is kind of a weirdo and not even a particularly good interviewer.
Most of these are two-parters: Berlin interviews the women before birth and after. Here are some of my favorites.
Moore wanted to have a home birth with her first baby, but she ended up having a platelet issue that both required her to be in the hospital and prevented her from getting an epidural. Ok, that sucks!! She seems to really love her husband. (Dawes frontman Taylor Goldsmith.)
Duff has done this podcast THREE TIMES — a gift. She had home births with her daughters Banks, Mae, and Townes and is so charming in the way she talks about them. If you are gearing up to give birth and only want to hear positive, not-scary stories, I would start with these.
(Note: Ashley Tisdale, one-time member of Moore and Duff’s mommy group, has not been interviewed for this podcast.)
This one is interesting because Mara talks about her famous family and the dynamic between her, her husband Jamie Bell, and his ex-wife Evan Rachel Wood (Bell and Wood share a son). Mara wanted to have a home birth with her first baby but ended up having an emergency C-section because she got cholestasis.
Honorable mentions: Amanda Seyfried, Glee’s Jenna Ushkowitz, Casey Wilson, Aly Michalka (of Aly & AJ).
Also: The wildest celebrity birth story is actually on a different podcast — Katie Lowes’s now-defunct parenting podcast “Katie’s Crib.” In 2021, Lowes inteviewed Pretty Little Liars actress Troian Bellisario about giving birth to her second daughter in the car in the parking garage of the hospital. (Everyone was fine!) We got to the hospital very much in time to have my second baby in December, but I definitely thought about this one on the drive.
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