Born to be Wild the podcast

Did you know that having the same person support you through your entire pregnancy, birth and postpartum dramatically reduces the need for interventions? Fewer C-sections, less medication, shorter labour. Not because of a medical procedure, but because of one person who knows you and stays. Catharina Ooijens spent over a decade proving exactly that. As the first clinical doula in the Netherlands,...

You deserve a village. But in Portugal, finding the right people around you during pregnancy and birth can feel overwhelming. Where do you even start? In this episode, Aviva shares what she wished she had known when she was pregnant in Portugal, and why she decided to build the thing that should have existed all along. Borntobewild.pt is a directory of verified perinatal practitioners in Portugal,...

Mara never planned to become a mother. At thirty she was living in New York, chasing her career, with motherhood nowhere on her radar. Then her partner gifted her something she never asked for: egg freezing. The morning after the procedure, he still hadn't called. So she checked his Uber account. That is how she found out... well, listen to the podcast! It took her a year to rebuild. Then she met...

Isabel had a plan. Home birth, the right midwife, months of preparation.... Then, at 36 weeks, pre-eclampsia changed everything. What she did next is what makes this story so powerful. Because even inside that hospital, Isabel stayed in charge. She refused interventions she didn't need. She vocalized through every contraction while the nurses asked Pepe to keep it down because the dad next door wa...

Sara Arruda is a nurse, a midwife, a health coach, and the author of Cuida-te. She is also a mother of three boys. All three born premature. And all three completely different births. Her first started with a helicopter evacuation at 26 weeks. She woke up after the C-section not wanting to open her eyes. Because she did not know if her baby was alive... Twelve years later, she tried again. And aga...

There is a word that most women have never heard. But the moment they do, something shifts. The word is matrescence . It describes the complete transformation a woman goes through when she becomes a mother. Not just physically. but also eurologically, emotionally, spiritually, and socially. All of it at once! Hannah Staunton is a somatic and yoga psychotherapist who specializes in supporting mothe...

Rita always knew she wanted to become a mother. What she didn't know was how long that road would be, or how many times she would have to start over. Three miscarriages. IVF, alone, in a foreign country. A premature birth that left her with joy and grief at the same time. And a second pregnancy that forced her to make one of the hardest decisions of her life. Rita did her homework. She asked quest...

Filipa Piedade became a midwife because of her own birth. And that birth was one of the hardest experiences of her life. Being a nurse, she thought she knew what to expect, but... she didn't. The birth of her daughter turned out to be traumatic. She had no idea that what happened to her had a name. That it wasn't her fault! But instead of just carrying that with her, she used it. She stepped back...

Raquel Cajão has been attending home births in Portugal for over eleven years. She didn't touch the last baby she delivered. Why? She didn't need to! In this episode, Raquel talks about what it really means to support a physiological birth. Not as a technician managing a process, but as someone who knows how to read a room, a breath, a small movement, without saying a word. She calls it rhythm, fo...

Irene Jaspers is one of the hosts of this podcast. She is also a doula on Santa Maria, on of the smaller islands of the Azores. And in this episode, she is the guest! Her second pregnancy was going beautifully. Then, four weeks before her due date, the maternity ward of the only public hospital on the neighboring island caught fire. Everything changed. What followed was a homebirth she never plann...

Koen Deurloo is a gynecologist and obstetrician in Utrecht, the Netherlands, who has spent over a decade quietly rewriting what a cesarean birth can look like. Not by changing the surgery, but by changing who is at the centre of it. In this episode, Koen introduces the MAC method, or Mother Assisted Cesarean, where the mother herself lifts her baby out of the womb with her own hands. He explains h...

Sara do Vale has been inside Portuguese maternity care for over a decade, as a doula, as an activist, and as a mother of three. She has sat in parliament, co-founded the Portuguese Birthrights Association, and supported women through births in both public and private hospitals. She does not soften the picture. In this episode, Sara breaks down what giving birth in Portugal actually looks like toda...

In this first episode, we sit down with Maria and Carlos, a Portuguese couple who chose to prepare for a home birth in Lisbon after years of living in London. What makes their story remarkable is that Maria is a doctor. A GP specializing in women's health, who trained inside the very system she was choosing to step away from. Together with her partner Carlos, she spent months preparing for a non-m...