Emilie de Ravin Faced Back Labor with Her First Child: It Felt Like It 'Was Going to Snap'

Emilie de Ravin wanted to welcome her daughter at a birthing center — until a difficult labor made that goal impossible.

The Lost and Once Upon a Time actress, who is currently expecting her second child, a son, and has been pregnant on television and in real life, opened up about the trying and funny moments of those pregnancies on Dr. Elliot Berlin’s Informed Pregnancy podcast.

Her labor with Vera Audrey, her first child with writer/director Eric Bilitch, in March 2016 started with less pain than she had anticipated.

“Then it just switched to the most agonizing pain I’ve ever had in my life … a couple of hours into it,” recalled de Ravin, 36.

“Long story short, I was in back labor for probably about eight hours after that,” she explained. “Nothing in the front at all. It just 100 percent felt like my back was going to snap in half.”

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Her midwife suggested that she go to the hospital for an epidural. “My backup doctor was the most wonderful man in the world. I want him to adopt me,” she joked. “He let me have a full-on vaginal birth. … He did everything manually and just let me have the birth that I wanted, minus the epidural and minus the hospital.”

Months after Vera was born, Bilitch popped the question in July 2016, and de Ravin announced that she is pregnant with their second child, a baby boy, this past June.

When her son arrives, de Ravin is going to give home birth a shot again. “I … really opened my mind to [a home birth],” she said. “I’m really excited about planning to do it at home but again being open to … having a great backup doctor in case.”

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One of her televised pregnancies had more levity: When she revealed to the Once Upon a Time team that she was expecting her daughter, her news got her out of some tricky filming.

“Twelve weeks rolls around, and it was perfect timing because I was just about to start filming this totally Belle-centric, my character Belle, episode. All me. Lots of stuff. They had me doing all these things. I’m like, ‘Oh God,’ ” de Ravin remembered. “Then the dates came up and I’m like, ‘Perfect, I can tell them literally the day before: FYI, don’t put me in that boat.’ “

Once Upon a Time wrote her pregnancy into the show — when she was already nearing her delivery date.

“I think I was about seven months pregnant … you could obviously tell I was pregnant, and it was written in,” the actress said. “And I had to do this scene with Robert Carlyle … He’s like, ‘You’re pregnant.’ And I’m like, ‘What?’ as my stomach is, literally, my belly is touching him.”