Gigi Hadid didn’t even notice her baby had been born after she was left “exhausted” by her 14-hour labour.
The 25-year-old model welcomed her daughter, Khai, with her boyfriend Zayn Malik in September, and has revealed it took her 14 hours to deliver her baby, by which point she was so tired that “it didn’t even click” in her brain that her daughter had been born.
Speaking to Vogue magazine, she said: “It didn’t even click that she was out. I was so exhausted, and I looked up and he’s holding her. It was so cute.”
Gigi gave birth at her home in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, after the COVID-19 pandemic meant she didn’t feel safe delivering Khai in a hospital.
And the model claims she and Zayn, 28, prepared for the arrival of their daughter by watching the 2008 documentary ‘The Business of Being Born’, which is critical of medical interventions and depicts a successful home birth.
She said: “What I really wanted from my experience was to feel like, ‘Okay, this is a natural thing that women are meant to do’. We both looked at each other and were like, I think that’s the call.”
But giving birth at home meant Gigi had to deal with the pain of labour without any medication, and the model revealed her mother, Yolanda Hadid, and her doula – who watched the process over Zoom – coached her through the process.
She explained: “I had to dig deep. I knew it was going to be the craziest pain in my life, but you have to surrender to it and be like, ‘This is what it is.’ I loved that.
“There definitely was a point where I was like, I wonder what it would be like with an epidural, how it would be different. My midwife looked at me and was like, ‘You’re doing it. No one can help you. You’re past the point of the epidural anyway, so you’d be pushing exactly the same way in a hospital bed.’ ”
And when little Khai finally arrived, Gigi – who also had her sister, Bella Hadid, present for the tot’s birth – and Zayn agreed they won’t be going through the process of expanding their family again for a little while.
Gigi said: “I know my mom and Zayn and Bella were proud of me, but at certain points I saw each of them in terror. Afterward, Z and I looked at each other and were like, We can have some time before we do that again.”
