Gigi Hadid Details Painful Home Birth — and Reveals Zayn Malik Caught the Baby!

New mom Gigi Hadid is opening up to Vogue about welcoming her baby girl Khai back in September.

Hadid revealed she originally planned to give birth at a hospital in New York City, but she and boyfriend Zayn Malik changed course due to the COVID-19 pandemic, and after watching a successful home birth featured in the documentary “The Business of Being Born.”

She opted to give birth at home in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, with Zayn, her mother Yolanda, sister Bella, a local midwife, and her assistant by her side.

The couple started with a blow-up tub in the bedroom, and they had to send their pets packing for fear they would pop a hole in it. When she went into labor, they passed the time watching “The Indian in the Cupboard.”

Gigi explained, “That’s something we’d never talked about but in that moment we discovered we both loved.”

Labor lasted 14 hours, and Gigi said of the pain, “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.”

At one point she wondered what it would have been like to get an epidural. Gigi said, “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.’”

The model said of giving birth naturally, “I think they all knew that I have that animal in me… When you see someone do that, you look at them a bit differently. I probably looked crazy, actually. I was an animal woman.”

Zayn was the one who caught the baby, and Gigi revealed, “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 said Khai’s heartbeat stayed consistent during labor, and that “she was so bright right away,” adding, “That’s what I wanted for her, a peaceful bringing to the world.”

She continued, “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.’”

Hadid said Malik compared the whole experience to a lion documentary where the male paces while the lioness gives birth to the cubs. “Z was like, ‘That’s how I felt! You feel so helpless to see the person you love in pain.’”

For now, Gigi and Zayn don’t have any nannies and are raising their daughter on their own, aside from the help of family.

Hadid’s mom Yolanda gushed about her daughter, “She decided to completely take care of the baby alone,” adding, “I’m proud of her face on a magazine, but seeing her give birth was a whole other level of proud. You go from looking at her as a daughter to looking at her as a fellow mother.”