Hilary Duff Dishes on Her Home Water Birth

Hilary Duff is opening up about the birth of her daughter Banks.

The Younger star shared her experience with water birth in an interview published Thursday on Dr. Elliott Berlin’s Informed Pregnancy podcast. The conversation was recorded 10 days after Duff and boyfriend Matthew Koma welcomed daughter Banks Violet on Oct. 25.

In the talk, Duff revealed she went into labor at 12:30 a.m. and reached out to her doula and midwives around 2 a.m., as first reported by PEOPLE, thinking that she would give birth quickly given her experience with her first child.

Instead, Duff revealed that her labor went on for “a really long time.”

As for her first son, 6-year-old Luca, Hilary said on the podcast that he remained “totally calm” and seemed to not be too interested in what was going on. Koma, however, got a stern clawback from Duff at one point after he told her to relax.

She remembered telling him, “You have to shut up. You’re going to die if you say that again!”

As her labor progressed, Duff recalled feeling frustrated after he contractions failed to come close together, meaning she was not progressing as fast as she and her midwives hoped. Despite some frustrations, the actress eventually got to the time where she had to get situated in the birthings tub, which she called “such a happy moment and also scary.”

Once it came time to push, however, things started to happen quickly.

“It was, like, five pushes,” Duff said. “That part didn’t hurt as bad as I thought it was going to.”

She added: “I was scared I was going to be in extreme pain in my vagina and it was not like that. It was very painful in my hips and then it was scary… just the overall bigness of what was happening than, ‘Ow, this hurts too bad, I can’t do it again.’”

Duff remembered that Koma and the midwives had to help hold her up on the tubas she pushed, as she was using all her strength to push and could hold herself up.

Once Banks was born, Duff said the baby needed “a couple of breaths” from one of the midwives before she started breathing on her own.

“They hand her to me and I’m looking at her… and she reaches up both of her arms and curls into me… reaches up her arms right at my neck, as if to give me a hug,” she recalled. “I couldn’t believe how strong she was, but it was so clearly a hug…. It made me feel like she was like, ‘Good team, Mom, we did it.’”

Despite the challenges, Duff said she would not hesitate to do another home birth in the future and thanked Koma, Luca, her mom and her sister Haylie Duff for being there for her.

Photo credit: Hilary Duff / Instagram