The Home Birth Whisperer

For the clientele of Carson Meyer, doula to the stars, childbirth is a primitive rite of and a passage modern branding opportunity.

- By Carrie Battan

EIsa Hosk was used to being photographed. The statuesque Swedish model had appeared in eight annual Victoria's Secret fashion shows, and she'd been a muse for a Rodeo Drive's worth of luxury fashion brands. On Instagram, she had routinely posted behind-the-scenes snapshots, playful selfies, and scenic vacation dispatches wearing lingerie for her 8 million followers. But late one morning in February 2021, the camera captured Hosk like she'd never been captured before, in the most vulnerable of scenarios: giving birth to her first child, in her own home in Los Angeles. Her nine-pound daughter, Tuulikki, was in a complex position, with her hand and her arm raised above her head and extending into the birth canal. It was a situation that could have sounded alarm bells in the hospital, and might have elicited some form of surgical intervention, like a Cesarean section or an episiotomy. But at home with her doula and midwife, Hosk worked through it with massage and pushing. There were no makeup artists, no posing, no optimization of angles just raw human exertion. For once, Hosk wasn't even aware of the camera. "You're like an animal. It's brutal," she tells me. "I was so inside the birth that I didn't notice her photographing me. You're just in a different dimension."