Hailey Bieber on Her 18-Hour Labor, Baby Jack, and Plans for More Kids With Justin

Hailey Bieber didn’t hold back when telling Vogue about her 18-hour labor with baby Jack. In her first extended interview since welcoming her and Justin Bieber’s son in August, the model got candid about child birth, making peace with her postpartum body, and her thoughts on having more children.

Hailey did all she could to prepare for giving birth, but it still ended up being “the hardest thing I’ve ever done,” she said. Vogue detailed that during her pregnancy Hailey did “breathing exercises, acupuncture, yoga, pelvic-floor therapy, workouts, walking, weight training.”

“I was on that shit,” Hailey explained. “I was doing everything. I felt stronger physically than I ever had before.” Hailey ended up being induced at 39 weeks, with doctors using “Pitocin, a medication that provokes contractions, and a Foley balloon, in which a catheter-like device is inserted into the uterus and inflated with saline to get the cervix to dilate,” Vogue reported.

It was uncomfortable to say the least, Hailey told the outlet: “That shit was so crazy. That was not fun. They broke my water. I went into labor and I labored for a few hours. No epidural, nothing.” She suffered from excessive postpartum bleeding but had faith in her medical team: “I trust my doctor with my life,” she said. “And 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.”

With that experience behind her, Hailey would still go through pregnancy again. The model wants at least one more child and is open to having more. She and Justin will take it “a kid at a time,” she said.

Hailey has made peace with her postpartum body, though it was a process, she admitted: “When people talk about ‘bouncing back’—back where, 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. 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?”

Being Jack’s mother has been a delight though: “He’s my priority. He is the most important thing to me,” she said, adding that motherhood has “been my biggest teacher so far, the biggest teacher in my relationship. You see your partner so differently. I think you empathize with your parents a lot more. There’s so much perspective that comes with it.”

She praised Justin’s parenting, calling him a natural. In an email to Vogue, Justin gushed about their life as a family of three: “I’m walking in the days I always dreamed of.”