Tennessee Woman Delivers Own Baby In Turkish Hotel Using YouTube

LA VERGNE, TN -- Newborns, they say, come when they're ready, not necessarily when mom is, and over the millennia, babies have been delivered just about everywhere and in every way imaginable: on stagecoaches crossing the prairie, in taxi cabs snarled in traffic jams, on airplanes zooming across the ocean.

Some babies are even born in hospitals.

But it's safe to say Xavier Ata Freeman is one of the few babies delivered in a Turkish hotel bathroom after his mom got tips from YouTube videos.

Twenty-two-year-old Tia Freeman, who serves in the Air Force, was flying from Tennessee to Germany via Istanbul March 7, on her way to visit her friend - and former University of Tennessee linebacker - Jakob Johnson. Tia was deep into her third trimester, but, as she tweeted, she didn't find out she was pregnant until January and she'd already planned for and paid for the trip by then.

It was while waiting in Turkish customs that it occurred to her that the little guy may be on the way. Despite being barely able to stand, Tia makes her way to her hotel, now for certain she's in labor. She's having a hard time finding an English speaker - and she speaks no Turkish - and has no idea what the Turkish equivalent to 911 is, so she does what anyone her age would do at the beginning of a DIY project.

After her YouTube research, she opted for a water birth, so she filled up the bathtub, used her phone as a timer, grabbed a towel to bite on and one to wrap the baby in and pushed.

Spoiler alert: it hurt.

The pain didn't last long, though. Her little man came into the world after just a few pushes.

Oh, but she's not done.

Noting that the reality of a water birth is very different from the sanitized YouTube version, Tia went back to the Internet for tips on clipping the umbilical cord.

Lots of things are available in hotel rooms in 2018, but not medical clamps, so Tia went MacGyver style: she boiled her shoelaces in the in-room tea kettle to sanitize them, tied them on to the cord and clipped it using a pocketknife. As you do.

And then, because, of course, she cleaned up the bathroom and went to sleep.

Waking up the next morning, she knows she has another challenge ahead: she obviously can't fly with this newborn, but she'd already paid for the taxi and assuming that, at the least, someone at the airport speaks English and might be able to help, she heads there.

After convincing an initially incredulous airline staff and Turkish customs officials she wasn't a human trafficker, they get her to a hospital to get checked out - everything was fine - and the airline, which Tia said was top-notch, even buying the kiddo his first outfit - got her to the consulate in Istanbul, which issued a birth certificate and emergency passport.

The airline staff convinced Tia that her little guy needed to honor the land of his birth in some way so she asked them for a "cute boy name," she told BuzzFeed. They suggested "Ata."

Meanwhile, mom and baby became a Turkish media sensation, bringing Turkish Airlines some positive press, so they paid for a hotel room for two weeks, comped meals and paid for the flight back to the states.

Because of the short time between her finding out she was pregnant and Xavier's birth, hardly anyone knew she was expecting, including her family.

She told Buzzfeed she told her grandmother, who told her mother, "and then my mom went crazy telling the rest of our family and every other person she came in contact with."

Otherwise, she kept it mostly to herself and stayed under the radar - well, except in Turkey, where headlines declared her "a hero" and "a national treasure" - until the aforementioned Jakob Johnson shared her story on Twitter, in part because he wanted to gin up support for Tia's GoFundMe campaign, as she was ultimately billed by the hospital and tapped her savings in the weeks after Xavier's birth.

Then her tale went viral in the U.S., including shoutouts from YouTube.

Meanwhile, the now-seven-weeks-old Xavier is back home and doing just fine.

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Photo via GoFundMe