Sarah Patrick already had two kids, so when the contractions came ahead of her third birth on Saturday, May 9, she knew what they meant: She and her husband David needed to get to the hospital.
So the Louisville, Kentucky, couple left their other children with their grandparents and drove to Baptist Health Louisville around 3 am, the Courier-Journal reported.
But they were met with locked doors. Then Sarah's water broke.
"We're in the middle of the street, and she can't move," David told the Courier-Journal. "She nearly collapses in front of the labor and delivery sign."
David helped her lie down and called 911, and a dispatcher coached him through next steps. Quickly, he could see the baby's head crown and seconds later, the rest of the body flipped out "like a fish," David said.
At the dispatcher's instruction, he wiped the crying baby's mouth, wrapped him in a jacket, and looked for something to tie off the umbilical cord. In the absence of shoe strings, that something was a face mask knit by his grandmother, which David rolled "like a really tight tortilla."
Soon, an ambulance came and Sarah was admitted to the hospital, where she recovered with her healthy newborn, named Navi Bond. Navi means "prophet" in Hebrew and Bond refers to one of David's favorite movie franchises.
Overall, the delivery was "the least complicated" of Sarah's three births and she rated her pain a one on a scale of 1 to 10.
"Everybody's happy. Everybody's healthy," David told the Courier-Journal. "We thought we had planned for everything, but obviously there were a couple little holes in the plan."
Planned out-of-hospital births may be more appealing during the coronavirus
While Sarah didn't plan to give birth literally outside of the hospital, more pregnant woman are looking into the option as the novel coronavirus makes hospitals less appealing places to deliver.
In some places, for instance, laboring women couldn't have their partners or a doula by their sides, and others just wish to avoid delivering in a facility overcrowded with highly contagious COVID-19 patients.
But research is mixed on the safety of home births, which are controversial in the medical community, even among midwives. Risa Klein, a certified nurse midwife told Insider's Julia Naftulin a midwife-assisted hospital birth is safest, especially during a pandemic, since "minutes matter" if something goes wrong.
But Sarita Bennett, a physician, certified nurse midwife, and the president of the Midwives of North America Alliance, said planned home births can be good choices for healthy, low-risk women mostly because they help avoid potentially risky medical interventions like C-sections.
Allison Yarrow, a mom who purposefully delivered her third baby at home, argues the coronavirus should prompt the healthcare system to make home births more accessible to healthy women with uncomplicated pregnancies.
The experience may lower the risk of contracting COVID-19, almost guarantees moms and babies won't be separated after birth, and allows women to have more control and perhaps a lower-risk of mental health repercussions afterward, she writes.
The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists "believes that hospitals and accredited birth centers are the safest settings for birth," but supports women in making medically-informed decisions about their deliveries.
