'Badass' mother' gives birth alone in hotel room with only the help of YouTube tutorials'

A "badass" mother has claimed she gave birth alone in an Istanbul hotel room with only the help of YouTube tutorials.

Tia Freeman did not find out she was pregnant until her third trimester because she was on a birth control pill that stopped her periods, according to an account of the story she posted to her Twitter.

When she found out she was with child, she was "in denial" and didn't tell anybody, she wrote.

Ms Freeman said she did not cancel her holiday to see a friend, Jakob Johnson, in Germany because she "was not about to waste international flight money" and the baby was not due yet.

But on her flight from the US to Istanbul she started feeling ill. "I don’t know if it was the salmon, the flight, or it was just my time but out of nowhere I start cramping up," she wrote.

She thought it was food poisoning and decided to try and sleep it off.

"When I wake up the cramps have gotten worse," she wrote. "And I’m like okay I just want to make it to my hotel. Its my layover and I’m only here (Istanbul, Turkey) for 17hrs."

Going through customs at Istanbul, she said she felt so ill that she googled her symptoms and realised she was in labour. She told herself: "You need to get it together and make it to your hotel."

By that point, she wrote: "There is no way in the world I’m not in labour because I can barely stand up at this point.

"So I’m in a foreign country, where no one speaks English, I don’t know this country’s emergency number, and I have no clue what to do."

She said she then had a brainwave and "In true millennial form I decided to YouTube it."

"I spring into action. Filling up the tub with warm water #WaterBirth, grabbing a towel to bite down on, grabbing another towel to wrap him/her up with whenever it pops out," she writes.

She safely delivered the baby after just a few pushes and sterilised a pair of shoelaces to cut the umbilical cord.

She observes: "It’s weird how focused a person becomes when they’re adrenaline starts going. Because at no point ever did I freak out. Like I just did what I had to do."

Then she returned to Istanbul airport the next day because she had already paid for the cab and said: "I didn’t know what I would need to leave the country with a newborn baby and I thought no better place to ask than the airport."

After she explained that she was not a human trafficker, they all arranged for her to get a birth certificate and passport from the US Embassy.

She told her friend Mr Johnson that she was slightly delayed and they then met up a few days later as he was flying back to the US through Turkey.

He was surprised to find her with a healthy baby boy, who she named Xavier Ata because Ata is a Turkish name.

After her tale was widely shared online, one person wrote: "Congrats on your beautiful little man and for handling that like a BOSS!"

Another impressed reader noted that she was "a badass, holy ****."