"And it was just heartbreaking."
For the first time since becoming a mom in August 2024, Hailey Bieber is sharing intimate details of her birth story.
During a conversation with Vogue, Bieber called giving birth “the hardest thing I’ve ever done.”
As Bieber explained, despite all of the prep she had done prior to going into labor, which included “breathing exercises, acupuncture, yoga, pelvic-floor therapy, workouts, walking, weight training,” when she began leaking amniotic fluid at 39 weeks, nothing was how she imagined it would be.
“I was doing everything,” Beiber told Vogue. “I felt stronger physically than I ever had before.”
But once she began leaking fluid, Bieber was given Pitocin to induce labor as her doctor used a Foley balloon to encourage her cervix to dilate.
Calling the process “so crazy,” Bieber added that it “was not fun. They broke my water. I went into labor and I labored for a few hours. No epidural, nothing.”
It was 18 hours later before she gave birth to Jack Blues Bieber.
Like most mothers, her focus immediately went to her newborn son, hoping to continue holding him close after carrying him for nine months. However, Jack was whisked away when Bieber began to experience postpartum hemorrhaging.
“I trust my doctor with my life,” Bieber told Vogue, calling the situation “a little bit scary.” “So I had peace that I knew she would never let anything happen to me. But I was bleeding really badly, and people die, and the thought crosses your mind.”
As her team of medical professionals worked to get the bleeding to stop, Bieber had only one thing on her mind. “I wanted to hold my baby. I wanted to be with him.”
Now that nine months have passed, Bieber said it’s important for her to share her story.
And despite the unpredictable parts of her pregnancy and birth story, she hopes to expand her family in the future.
Suddenly, your partner starts to see you “like, ‘My woman is a god. A superhero. I could never.’ ” Bieber said of her husband, pop star Justin Bieber. “At least that was the case for me.”
Bieber also discussed coming to terms with the changes she experienced both mentally and physically after having a baby.
“Every day I have to talk to myself, like, Hailey, you had a baby,” she says. “You grew a human. You birthed a human. It’s okay. Give yourself grace. Give yourself time.”
“When people talk about ‘bouncing back’— back where,” Bieber asked, “because my hips are wider, my boobs are actually bigger than they were before. They did not go back. And great, I’ll take it, but it’s not the same body that it was before.”
“You’re not the same person that you were before,” Bieber tells Vogue. “You change head to toe. And I think there was a minute where I kept really hyper- fixating on getting back to what I was. And then I had to go through that acceptance of, ‘I’m not going back.’ So it’s really about how do I want to move forward? Who do I want to be?”
Now, Bieber says she is so much less focused on the outside world and mostly focused on giving Jack everything he needs.
“He’s my priority. He is the most important thing to me,” she says, telling Vogue that motherhood has “been my biggest teacher so far, the biggest teacher in my relationship.”
“You see your partner so differently,” the 28-year-old said calling her husband “a natural” when it comes to being a dad. “I think you empathize with your parents a lot more. There’s so much perspective that comes with it.”
The feeling is mutual.
Following the release of her Vogue cover, Justin Bieber took to Instagram to praise his wife.
“Yo this reminds me when Hailey and I got into a huge fight,” he wrote in the caption. “I told Hails that she would never be on the cover of Vogue. Yikes I know, so mean. For some reason because I felt so disrespected, I thought I gotta get even.”
“I think as we mature we realize that we’re not helping anything by getting even,” he continued. “We’re honestly just prolonging what we really want which is intimacy and connection. So baby (you) already know but forgive me for saying (you) wouldn’t get a Vogue cover (because) clearly I was sadly mistaken.”
