Glimpse inside 'Orange Is the New Black' Star Danielle Brooks' Motherhood & Childbirth

The Netflix series star actress Danielle Brooks shares a one-year-old daughter with her fiancé, whose identity she has managed to keep a private thing so far.

31-year-old actress and singer Danielle Brooks is most known for her role as Taystee on the Netflix drama series “Orange Is the New Black,” and she recently added the role of mother to her resume.

It’s been already a little more than a year since Brooks welcomed her only daughter to date, daughter Freyaa, on November 2019, and her little bundle of joy is now a regular feature on her mother’s social media feed.

A few days before Freyaa arrived at her first birthday, Brooks opened up about becoming a first-time mother and her motherhood journey so far. As she told Women’s Health magazine:

“I felt like I knew myself on a deeper level than before, because suddenly I was imparting what I’ve learned and who I am to another human being.”

PREGNANCY ANNOUNCEMENT

Back in early July 2019, Brooks broke the happy news that she was expecting her first child, revealing via Instagram that she was five months pregnant. She accompanied the announcement with a snapshot of herself with a pregnancy test.

As soon as Brooks made her pregnancy public, the press started to suggest that she was expecting a daughter, even though she hadn’t disclosed the baby’s gender yet, and they were right about it in the end.

WELCOMING FREEYA

Baby Freeya made her Instagram debut on November 18, 2019, two days after her birth, when her famous mother took to the social network to share a black and white picture of her daughter resting on her belly and chest.

But it was only on January 2020 when the little girl was already 10 weeks old that Brooks revealed Freeya’s name, marking the occasion with a frontal portrait of the baby laughing and holding blocks that read “10 weeks.”

EMERGENCY C-SECTION

It was only recently that Brooks started to publicly discuss having to resort to an emergency C-section after she was forced at the last minute to leave her natural birth plans behind.

Talking to Katie Lowes’ “Katie’s Crib” podcast in November 2020, Brooks shared that she had a healthy and pleasant pregnancy up to her labor and delivery, which weren’t as she had expected at all.

"I ended up having to have an emergency [Cesarean] section because Freeya had meconium in her system, which meconium is basically when the baby poops inside their amniotic sac," Brooks was quoted as telling Lowes.

Brooks admitted that she was very afraid of having to undergo the emergency procedure, and she compared it to an episode of the medical drama series “ER,” but she said that both her baby and she were at risk and it had to be done.