Looking back

During her first pregnancy, Duff says she started out wanting an elective C-section. She was 23 when she and ex-husband Mike Comrie found out they were expecting, and she didn't have a lot of peers who were having kids.

Her mom had C-sections for Duff and her siblings, and Duff thought that's what she would do, too. But in her second trimester she decided that she would try delivering first. She had an epidural for Luka's birth but he was born without a C-section.

More than five years later, during her pregnancy with Banks, Duff watched Ricki Lake's 2008 documentary "The Business of Being Born" and started considering a different kind of birth plan the second time around.

"I just started thinking that I wanted a different experience," Duff tells the host of Informed Pregnancy, prenatal chiropractor, childbirth educator and labor doula Dr. Elliot Berlin.

"I'm older now. I love motherhood more than anything—I never thought I would be this way, I never thought I could be so happy and so fulfilled. It's not easy, because being a parent is not easy, but it's just a joy. And I thought to myself that I want to like fully get the full experience of what it is like to bring a baby into the world."

Having support from Matt, Haylie and her mom

When Duff brought the idea up with her partner, Matthew Koma, he "was amazing," she explains. He had some questions, but was down to support Duff in her birthing choices.

Duff says she thinks her mom Susan and sister Haylie were "nervous to think about not being in a hospital" at first, but once Duff explained things a bit and got to talk to them about her doula and midwives, Haylie got really pumped about the idea.

"She was so supportive and amazing. I think my mom was a little more worried but she got behind me," Duff recalls, adding that because her mom had C-sections herself, even seeing Duff deliver Luka vaginally in a hospital was a bit of a different experience for her, so being there for the home birth was taking things to an unfamiliar level.

"The first time she saw me having a contraction in the house she was cooking bacon for Luka," Duff explains, adding that she had to pause the conversation she was having and squat down during the contraction.

"My mom was like, 'Oh no, oh no, oh no' and I was like, 'Mom, you can't do that all day...She got used to it. She's my mom and just having the comfort your mom brings was important to me."

Having her mom and her sister there was important to Duff, who was able to labor upstairs (where Koma had dragged the birthing pool out of Luka's room, where it had been temporarily used as a trampoline, and got it set up in Duff's room) when she needed to and then come downstairs to chill with her mom, sister and son when she could.

Even though she started feeling the contractions in the middle of the night, she still wasn't in active labor by the time her mom was cooking bacon for Luka in the morning.

"I think that was the most surprising part for me, thinking that it was going to progress a lot faster than it did and it just didn't," she explains, adding that at one point she went back downstairs and her son was watching a Marvel movie on TV.

"When I pictured my birth I didn't picture watching Guardians of the Galaxy on TV. Luka was like explaining the characters to me," she explains.

Her birth team 

Duff's partner, son, sister and mother weren't the only ones in the house with her the day Banks was born. She had a doula, a birth photographer who is also a doula and three midwives. "I definitely got through some contractions alone," says Duff "[But] I needed a tribe of people.

Her people helped her in the moments when things got really scary. Like when she worried she wasn't progressing fast enough, or when the pain was intense.

Duff found squatting, sitting on a birthing ball, and using a heating pad were all helpful at different points in the process. "Also some oils, I smelled a lot of clary sage oil and that felt really good," she explains. "I don't know why it felt really good to me."

What didn't feel good was being told to relax. "Any time someone would tell me to relax I felt like I would punch them in the face," she says, adding that Koma used the phrase one too many times.

"He was like, 'just relax babe', and I was like 'you're gonna die if you say that'!"

At the suggestion of one of her midwives, Duff started imagining herself melting into the bed with each contraction, and found that was helpful, too.

And although her contractions never got as long or as close together as her team expected them to, one of her midwives eventually gave her the good news that she was progressing.

"She looks at me and she's like, 'you want to go get in the tub?' and I just started crying," Duff recalls. "It was such a happy moment."

In the tub

Duff says when she was moved to the birthing tub, her brain really let her body take over. After the birth she estimated she was in the tub for about 30 minutes, but Koma told her it was really more like 90. "My brain disconnected," she says. "I remember telling myself that I don't need to be here for all of this."

At one point, she looked at one of her midwives and said, 'I'm really scared right now." Exhausted and unable to hold her body up as she channelled all her energy into pushing, Duff let her team hold her legs and arms while she pushed.

Having a baby

When Banks' head emerged, it didn't feel quite like the birth videos Duff has seen.

"Honestly, when I got her head out I was shocked by the feelings," she told Dr. Berlin. "I've seen women reach down and pull their baby out, and I couldn't do that…I was like, okay I'm there, I'm there, I've got to finish this job, but it was like really intense. It wasn't pleasant at that point. I think I wasn't fully in my headspace, my body was doing what it needed to do. It wasn't until her body came out that I could like want to grab onto her and bring her up out of the water."

Baby Banks needed some breaths from a midwife when she was first pulled from the water, but because her son Luka was also born looking a little blue, Duff says she wasn't freaked out. Once she figured out how to breathe, little Banks did "the most amazing thing," her mama recalls.

"They hand her to me, and I'm looking at her—and you know, babies are like floppy little worms, they just don't have any control—and she reaches up both of her arms right at my neck as to give me a hug. It was so clearly a hug."

Duff says the hug made her feel like baby Banks was saying something: "Like, good [teamwork] mom, we did it."

After the birth, Duff's team made her a smoothie using a chunk of raw placenta (a practice that the CDC recommends against, but many women choose to partake in).

She says she's not trying to push her choices on anyone else, and that she wants mothers to feel supported in whatever choices they make for themselves. "It's a very personal choice and it's not for everyone, that's for sure, she says.

Duff says that although she was at times overwhelmed and scared, she's so happy that Banks' birth story unfolded at home, and she would do it all over again.

To hear the whole interview, check out the Informed Pregnancy podcast.