Mandy Moore had an unexpected birth story that she won’t ever forget.
“I ended up in the hospital, but it just meant at the last minute my whole birth team had to change,” Moore, 42, said on a recent episode of her “That Was Us” podcast. “I wanted to have midwific care at the hospital … and the one midwife that had privileges at Cedars [Sinai in Los Angeles] had to work in conjunction with a doctor, and the doctor I did not like.”
Moore recalled “being in the throes of pushing” with her midwife’s assistance while the doctor allegedly kept his distance.
“I remember distinctly looking at him and he was on his phone scrolling [on] like CNN.com,” the This Is Us alum said. “I’ll never forget. I was like, ‘Am I bothering you?’”
Moments later, Moore said her doctor revealed that there was “a lobster truck outside” the hospital in between her contractions.
“The midwife was like, ‘Oh, really?’ And he’s like, ‘Yeah, I mean, this is taking a really long time. I don’t think I’m going to be able to get one,’” Moore said. “I remember ‘cause it’s very me to be like, ‘I’m so sorry.’ I felt bad, like, I was wasting his time.”
Moore and husband Taylor Goldsmith welcomed sons Gus and Ozzie in 2021 and 2022, as well as daughter Louise in 2024.
As Moore detailed her childbirth experience on her podcast, her cohosts Sterling K. Brown and Chris Sullivan were confused by the doctor’s behavior.
“You should have hit him in the chest with a baby,” Sullivan, 45, joked, before Brown, 50, added, “This feels like an apt time to say it, and I’ll say it for you: Men, what’s up?”
Moore concurred with her former This Is Us colleagues.
“Men, what’s up? I was like, ‘Maybe you don’t need to be doing this anymore,’” she sarcastically quipped. “You could retire and go have your lobster roll, whatever you choose, sir.”
After leaving the hospital, Moore has embraced life as a mom of three without plans to expand her family further.
Subscribe to newsletters 
“I’m at the OBGYN getting a check up,” Moore wrote via Instagram in January. “I am endlessly grateful for my beautiful family AND there’s a certain sadness knowing I’m done having babies and won’t be pregnant again.”
Moore welcomed Louise when she was in her early 40s, which was labeled a “geriatric pregnancy.”
“I think at least in my experience, so many of my friends are having kids later in life, whether it’s by choice or it’s by circumstance or biology,” she previously said on the “Not Gonna Lie” podcast in July 2025. “I think the thing that I had the most trouble with is just like this system in general kind of treating us as this anomaly that we’re too old and we’re too complicated or high risk, and really, it’s like, ‘Nope, we’re just human beings.’”
