Sadly, I’m close to finishing my favorite class of all time: Midwifery Literature and Art. I’m posting one of my assignments here. I’m supposed to write a “midwifery pet peeve rant:” A 2-paragraph “furious diatribe.” Then, I’m to turn the tables, and write 2 more paragraphs “advocating” for my pet peeve.

Here’s what I wrote:

After returning to the home birth community, I’m noticing a troubling trend associated with the rise of Instagram. Let’s call it the “Instagram Birth Syndrome.” Quite a few women today come to homebirth after seeing a few blissful seconds of Instagram births. And she might not even realize that she doesn’t so much want the *home* birth as much as she wants the *Instagram* birth. But what is that Instagram birth? It’s a few seconds of selected scenes, beautiful, sweet scenes carefully edited and woven together. One might see the woman “breathing” her baby out in the water. Or 30 seconds of photos from a few shots of labor, to the smiles of the baby on the breast.

But something is greatly lacking with birth preparation often consisting of a random flood of Instagram birth images tracking through one’s brain. Are clients committed to the philosophy of home birth? the philosophy of birth’s natural-ness and physiological flow? Do they really know all that birth entails? For the modern woman in a developed country, natural birth is probably the most intense physical challenge she will ever face. Not to mention the overwhelming hormonal/emotional elation usually ending from that process. In most births I attend, birth doesn’t look anything like an Instagram Birth impression. It is loud, it is pain, it is purpose, it’s messy, it is challenge, it is going inside yourself—leaving the world of time and rational thought. For hours. It’s agony and hard, hard work. It’s not something you can really capture on Instagram. Nor the world of hormonal ecstasy that awaits in the hours and days following birth. The complete Ecstasy. It’s strange, getting to the end of a woman’s birth journey with her, realizing that she was expecting the Instagram version of birth, not the unfilmable version of what her birth really was. Most of actual birth would never “make it’ on Instagram.

On the other hand, Instagram has been the greatest modern asset to positive birth change. Women are able to see, with great intimacy, the powerful sacredness of a woman giving birth. Instagram-able images capture something about the special nature of a child being born—it’s no longer hidden away in books, locked away in hospitals; it’s there, in everyone’s face. Birth, in all its power and respect. Midwives honoring women, dads being supported and supportive, birth being honored—to unfold inside the family and home environment, accompanied by beauty and ritual that befits the act of birth.

Instagram has changed the grip of hierarchy and hidden, systematic de-birthing of birth that the medical model enshrined. Instagram has put birth back into women’s hands, literally. They can see and learn from one another in ways that are a bit similar to the old-style community birth, when women gathered around to support the laboring mom. It’s not quite the same, but pretty close.

Is Instagram responsible for “Instagram Birth Syndrome” or is it home birth’s greatest asset? Take your pick. It’s probably both.

Photo: Victoria’s birth on the floor of our living room in Kyiv, 2007.