Sydney mom Elle Woods has shared her teen pregnancy story with the rest of the world.
What makes her story unusual is that her father helped deliver her baby when she went into labour at 4am in the morning. She was 16.
Woods shared her experience with her 58K followers on TikTok in a video that immediately went viral.
She woke up in the early hours and told her dad she wasn’t feeling very well; could he please give her a painkiller. Unbeknown to him, she was pregnant.
“My dad found out I was pregnant when I was 16 at 4am. My daughter was born at 4.20am, 20 minutes later,” she said.
“At the time we were living in a small town. There weren’t a lot of medical facilities, and the closest hospital was a 40-minute drive away,” Woods added.
She explained that her dad called emergency services and they talked him through the process.
“I don’t remember a lot because I did go into shock and I lost a whole lot of blood,” she said.
@therealelwoods Reply to @mochiidollii ♬ original sound - Elle Woods
@therealelwoods When I tell you he is never going to let me forget this, I mean he is NEVER going to let me forget this.
Asked in the comments section why she had concealed her pregnancy for so long, Woods responded: “I did know I was pregnant, I found out at seven months through my nutritionist, not my GP and I just didn’t tell anyone I was pregnant.”
Defending her decision, she said her family had been going through a tough time. “You have to understand mine and my family’s lives were absolute chaos.
“There was a lot going on and it’s like everyone’s problems were bigger than my problems so I just chose not to tell anyone I was pregnant because it was easier for everyone if they didn’t know,” she said.
In a follow-up post, she said her father quit his job to help take care of her daughter, Isabelle, so that she could continue going to school.
Woods’s birth story may not seem that unusual in a South African context.
According to the latest figures from the Gauteng Department of Health, teen pregnancies in South Africa increased by 60% during the Covid-19 pandemic.
A Statistics South Africa report from 2020 also showed that there were 33 0000 teenage mothers and 660 babies were born to mothers aged 10 and under.
“Early pregnancy and motherhood in South Africa creates a greater risk in terms of maternal complications, resulting in low survival rates of babies, and forces many girls to prematurely take on an adult role which they are not emotionally or physically prepared for,” the report read.