Giving birth is a painful yet fulfilling experience, and women feel that they should keep talking about it. When social media platforms like Facebook shifted their focus from college students to a universal audience, people got deeply involved with sharing anything and everything without even giving a thought to their privacy settings.
Human beings cannot live without social connections, both physically and mentally, and that is what makes social media so fascinating. What’s more, social media natives are now becoming parents and revealing details of their family’s private lives online. Hence, when it comes to giving birth, childbirth experiences have become trending subjects as women share their experiences openly across a broad range of platforms. So, does sharing birth experiences on social media empower other women, or horrify them?
The Reasons Why Some People Share
The exact situations surrounding childbirth are generally unpredictable and different mothers encounter different experiences. Consequently, mothers join platforms to share their narratives for the following reasons.
To Make Sense Of Their Stories.
Although prenatal education inspires confidence for labour and birth among expectant women, things may not go as planned. You may be taken in for surgery instead of going through natural delivery, and that may leave you feeling sad or angry. Therefore, while medical reasoning may explain that surgery was the safest option for a mother and her newborn, sharing her experience may help her find closure and make sense of the experience.
To Find A Support Network
There is so much anticipation concerning a baby’s arrival, and it is easy for a woman to feel cheated when she did not have the magical and natural experience she expected. Therefore, a woman who gave birth prematurely may find or create a connected community of mothers who went through a similar experience, just by posting a highlight reel of her journey.
To Share Information
Many childbirth experiences are usually off-script, and mothers find sharing as an opportunity to challenge the idealization surrounding childbirth. Women are letting go of their make-believe birth stories and boldly sharing the 'horror stories' of what happens during labour. While such women do not deny that babies are indeed lovely, they are not pretending that childbirth is as beautiful.
To Participate In Things Happening In The Childbirth World
No question, giving birth is painful and hard, and more women are becoming open and are sharing their experiences. In so doing, these women are not only building a connected resource available to first-time parents but also connecting with a large network of people regardless of where they come from. Although parents may be subject to unsolicited opinions and bad advice, they are part of what comes with the good, too.
Reasons Why Others Do Not Share
The dawn of online parenting platforms has created spaces for mothers to share their birth narratives, however explicit they may be. Still, some mothers avoid sharing their horror stories for the following reasons.
To Avoid Spreading Fear
Painful memories and childbirth experiences may put women off natural birth because of fear. Graphic birthing stories have fueled anxiety among pregnant women who have developed a fear of giving birth naturally. A study has shown that about 14 percent of pregnant women suffer from the fear of delivering vaginally, a condition called tokophobia. Consequently, some mothers have chosen not to narrate their unpleasant experiences to avoid spreading such fears.
To Be Thoughtful Toward Other Parents
Pregnancy is an uncertain and taxing process. The pre-natal checks for screening birth anomalies and genetic concerns often rule out any reasons for concern and many mothers assume they will give birth to a healthy baby. However, that is not usually the case for some future parents. A mother-to-be may refrain from rubbing her good news in the face of family members and friends who are not able to conceive or who just suffered a miscarriage.
Because Babies Have No Say About Their Online Presence
Sharing your birth experience means doing so without your baby’s consent. Thus, parents may avoid posting information about their babies online so that their children may not grow up resenting such disclosures.
The Bottom Line
Women have been sharing their childbirth experiences throughout history; however, the lack of balance in the narratives is the problem. The media’s focus on sharing horrific experiences has painted a damaging picture of the experience altogether. Nevertheless, there is room to balance out the negative sides of childbirth by sharing the positive aspects in equal measure.
Sources: theguardian.com, dailymail.co.uk, ncbi.nlm.nih.gov.