Gisele Bundchen, Gwyneth Paltrow, Bryce Dallas Howard: Hollywood's Pregnancy Pundits

Aug. 4, 2010 — -- Gisele Bundchen, Gwyneth Paltrow and Bryce Dallas Howard may be best known, respectively, as a supermodel, a screen star-turned-clean-living guru and an actress.

But the three famous females have taken on a more prominent role of late. They're leading Hollywood's pack of pregnancy pundits, stepping up on the proverbial soapbox to speak out about the ups and downs of pregnancy and motherhood.

Check out what each of the three celebrity moms recently said:

Gisele Bundchen on Mandatory Breast Feeding, Home Birthing

Bundchen, the 30-year-old Victoria's Secret model and mom to 7-month-old Benjamin, told the U.K. edition of Harper's Bazaar that giving the baby the breast ought to be the law.

"I think breastfeeding really helped. Some people here think they don't have to breastfeed, and I think, 'Are you going to give chemical food to your child when they are so little?'" she told Harper's Bazaar, according to the U.K.'s Daily Mail. "There should be a worldwide law, in my opinion, that mothers should breastfeed their babies for six months."

The wife of New England Patriots star quarterback Tom Brady said she never considered giving birth in a hospital.

"Not for one second did it cross my mind that I was not going to have my baby at home," she said. "I am not the first person to give birth naturally. Billions of other women have come before me and have done this -- so why can't I do it?"

But her preparation for birth was anything but prehistoric.

"You want to go into the most intense physical experience of your life unprepared? That doesn't make any sense to me," she said.

According to the magazine, Bundchen adhered to a rigorous regimen of yoga, kung fu and meditation during the weeks leading up to labor.

"Then I was ready and I thought, 'OK let's get to work,'" she said. "I wasn't expecting someone else to get the baby out of me. I had to do it together with him."

Her views might sound extreme, but shortly after Harper's Bazaar published her interview, Bundchen backtracked, saying her breastfeeding comments were misconstrued.

"My intention in making a comment about the importance of breastfeeding has nothing to do with the law," she wrote on her personal blog. "It comes from my passion and beliefs about children. Becoming a new mom has brought a lot of questions, I feel like I am in a constant search for answers on what might be the best for my child. ... I think as mothers we are all just trying our best."

Gwyneth Paltrow on Post-Partum Depression

Her GOOP newsletters are usually sunny samplers of natural remedies for allergy relief and ruminations on the glories of Vitamin D. But late last month, Paltrow's weekly post took on a darker subject.

"When my son, Moses, came into the world in 2006, I expected to have another period of euphoria following his birth, much the way I had when my daughter was born two years earlier," she wrote. "Instead, I was confronted with one of the darkest and most painfully debilitating chapters of my life. For about five months, I had what I can see in hindsight as postnatal depression, and since that time, I have wanted to know more about it. Not only from a hormonal and scientific standpoint, and why so many of us experience it, but from the perspective of other women who have gone through it."

The 37-year-old mother of two corralled another actress into sharing her story. Brooke Shields raised the profile of post partum depression in 2005 -- but this time, Paltrow handed the torch to Bryce Dallas Howard, daughter of famed actor-director, Ron Howard.

Bryce Dallas Howard on Hitting the Wall, Screaming Expletives

Howard, 29, found out she was pregnant seven days after her 2006 wedding. In Paltrow's newsletter, the "Twilight" actress wrote that she "treasured every moment I had with this new life growing inside me," even in the last month of her pregnancy when she tipped "the scale at over 200 pounds."

But after weathering a natural birth to son Theo, Howard "felt nothing." Soon after returning home from the hospital, things got worse.

"For me, breast-feeding was even more painful than giving birth," Howard wrote. "And despite a lactation consultant offering help, I felt incompetent. I refused to give up, forcing myself to do everything possible so that my son would consume only my breast milk with no supplementation. I forged on, barely sleeping, always either breast feeding or pumping and never getting the hang of it. Occasionally I drifted off for a few minutes, but that decision to 'feed at all costs' left me no room for recovery, no space to explore my feelings, no time to rest."

Instead of referring to her son by his name, Howard called him "it." She sobbed in the shower; she let the house fall to pieces.

"My husband began shooting a television series, and late evenings when he returned home, I would meet him at the door, shaking with fury, 'I've hit the wall and gone through it, and I feel I am expected to go further,'" she wrote. "He would ask what he could do to help, but knowing there was nothing he could do, I screamed expletives at him, behavior he had never experienced in the seven years we had been together."

A combination of homeopathic treatments and visits with a physician and a therapist helped Howard overcome her post-partum depression.

"Do I wish I had never endured post-partum depression? Absolutely," she wrote. "But to deny the experience is to deny who I am. I still mourn the loss of what could have been, but I also feel deep gratitude for those who stood by me, for the lesson that we must never be afraid to ask for help, and for the feeling of summer that still remains."