Amy Schumer has never shied away from sharing the details of her life, and in her new documentary series, Expecting Amy, she’s giving viewers an unflinching look at her pregnancy, including her complicated C-section procedure.
In the final episode of the three-part series, titled, “And Birth,” Schumer and her husband, Chris Fischer, discuss how the Caesarean section delivery has been determined to be her “best option” for giving birth, and Schumer works to get informed quickly, consulting her doula, Domino Kirke, and calling friend Amber Tamblyn for a rundown on how the procedure will go.
As Tamblyn promises, the first part of the process — the actual birth of Schumer’s son, Gene — goes fairly quickly. However, Schumer admits that she was still “out of my mind scared.”
“I don’t think I have the words to describe it,” she tells the camera emotionally. “I was just out of my mind scared. I didn’t know what I was going to do. I just stared right into Chris’ eyes, we just locked eyes, and he just held me there with his eyes. He did such a good job with me.”
“They say people with Asperger’s or autism have trouble with eye contact” — Fischer had been diagnosed as being on the autism spectrum earlier in the documentary — “but he held my eye contact the whole time. And then sometimes I would look at Domino and she was really supportive and she was wiping my sweat away. And I was so scared. Chris and I just stared into each other’s eyes.”
“It’s really, really deep, you know?” she says, wiping away tears. “It was the greatest moment of my life.”
For Fischer’s part, he remembers it like “a rush of every emotion you’ve felt throughout your whole life.”
“It felt like we were the only people in the world,” he adds. “Amy was really vulnerable. She was vulnerable in a way that I had never seen her, going through different stages of trauma and shock.”
Fischer and Kirke shot cell phone video inside the delivery room, but were forced to leave when the completion of Schumer’s surgery became more complicated. “The doctors had a very challenging time putting Amy back together for a few reasons,” Fischer explains.
Ultimately, what was supposed to be a one-hour procedure ended up taking three hours, and Schumer admits that being separated from her husband and son — and the uncertainty of her condition — was the most challenging part of the entire process.
“One of the hardest moments, I think, of my whole pregnancy, was when the doctor asked us to turn the camera off — and that’s every mother and parent’s worst nightmare, is finding out that something’s wrong,” she shared while speaking with 360aproko this week about the docuseries and her partnership with Tampax, aimed at helping to “take the shame and the myths away from women’s periods.”
As for why she decided to show all the highs and lows — from the delivery room nerves, to highlights from baby Gene’s adorable first year of life — Schumer said she wanted to provide a relatable look at pregnancy to set an example for other women who might go through a similar experience.
“Honestly, I feel like people relate to me, and I want to be as open as possible so that I can help women feel better about themselves,” she told 360aproko. “We all go through [so much]. We get our periods, we [go through] all this stuff that we’re not supposed to talk about. And with a pregnancy, we’re supposed to make it look easy and I just really reject that. So, I wanted people to hopefully feel better and educate other women about what might happen if they get pregnant.”
