In this episode, my husband, Bryan, and I share our first baby’s birth story. It’s a story of giving birth in an in-hospital birthing center in Manhattan at Mt. Sinai West in 2005. You’ll hear about a textbook-length 20+ hr labor with the expert labor support of a doula, and you’ll hear about the gamechanger self-advocacy tips and strategies that we used (and you can use!) to avoid interventions that were strategically avoidable and rendered unnecessary. These strategies helped us achieve what I had very much hoped for, which was an unmedicated, vaginal birth.