Birthing images have long been censored on social media—until a group of activists decided that women should be able to actually see a baby emerging from its mother’s vagina.
Katie Vigos decided that she’d had enough. It was December 2017, and the Los Angeles-based nurse and doula was ready to take action. Three years earlier, she’d launched an Instagram account called the Empowered Birth Project to help demystify birth for other women. Now she was battling the social media platform over her account.
The birth of Vigos’s second boy in 2010 had been an incredible, ecstatic experience. By the time she was pregnant with her third son, she’d decided she wanted to both document his birth and show others what birth actually looked like, so she created the Empowered Birth Project, and watched it grow in popularity within the burgeoning birth activism community—parents, doulas, and birth photographers advocating for greater acceptance of the realities of childbirth in America.
After launching EBP in May 2014, Vigos quickly became accustomed to a particular social media cycle: she’d post a childbirth photo on her account, either of herself or another laboring woman (with the subject’s permission), and watch the supportive comments pour in from parents around the world. Then, she’d wait for the inevitable: for Instagram to remove it, claiming it was against the company’s community guidelines.
Lauren Archer edited this photo of her son Silas’s birth in an attempt to work around Instagram. It was still deleted.
BRIAN ARCHER
Instagram—and its parent company, Facebook—have long considered birth photos too graphic and in violation of their policies against nudity. They often removed childbirth images and videos from pages with no explanation, and without the consent of users who post them, angering activists like Vigos, who felt the platforms were censoring vitally important imagery—that seeing real images of childbirth could be instructive, beautiful, even groundbreaking. “Birth is a moment of ultimate power and surrender for women,” Vigos told me. “Telling women that that power is offensive and needs to be hidden is sending a really damaging message.”
Early last December, a midwife friend shared a series of birth photos with Vigos of a Los Angeles woman named Lauren Archer. A few days prior, Archer had uploaded a “half-in-half-out” photo to her own 700-follower Instagram account. (In birth photography parlance, this refers to when a baby’s head is fully out of the vagina, while his body is still inside his mother.) She wrote a heartfelt poem to her son in the caption and softened the image with editing tools, concealing blood and blurring her pelvic region. When Archer returned to Instagram about two hours later, her photo and poem were gone. They’d been replaced by an ominous image that looked like a fogged-up mirror, with the message: “We removed your post because it doesn’t follow our Community Guidelines.” Her poem was lost for good; she hadn’t saved a copy. Archer tried re-posting the photo, but it was quickly deleted. She wrote the company to ask why it was removed, but says she never heard back.
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When Vigos saw Archer’s deleted photos, she knew she had to post them on the Empowered Birth Project’s account, even though they fell outside Instagram’s parameters. Vigos wrote in the caption that she was tired of “dancing around the fine print of Instagram’s censorship policies. I’m done. I don’t care anymore.” The post was liked 30,000 times. A striking number of the 3,000 comments were from women who said that, while they had given birth before—even multiple times—they’d never actually seen a baby being born. “I had no idea what I looked like while birthing my babies. What a beautiful sight to see,” wrote @tatudemommie. “LOVE YOUR FEED,” wrote @_amandatrudel. “Keep the beautiful educational pics coming. If this gets taken down shame on IG.”
Sure enough, the post was removed within the week. But this time, Vigos used the deletion of Archer’s photos to fuel a Change.org petition that Vigos titled “Allow uncensored birth images on Instagram.” The petition asked that birth photography be reclassified as educational material, rather than being categorized “with pornography, graphic violence, profanity, and other subject matter [Instagram and Facebook] deem too offensive for the public eye.” Overnight, the petition garnered 3,000 signatures. “Everyone’s frustration with birth censorship was peaking; I could sense that,” Vigos told me. “To wake up the next morning and see [those numbers] was very encouraging. Signing a petition is different than double-tapping a photo: people have to submit identifying information to sign a petition.” Today, it’s up to 23,000 signatures—a response that has pushed Instagram to re-evaluate its policies.
Lauren Archer giving birth to Silas in April 2017. These photos, taken by her father, Brian Archer, were removed by Instagram.
For Vigos, birth’s presence on social media platforms should be clear and straightforward: “You either allow birth to exist on your platform, or you don’t,” she said. “The petition is representative of our much bigger mission to empower ourselves as women—whether it’s about our bodily autonomy, our ability to birth with informed decisions and support, censorship of our bodies, the de-stigmatization of menstruation. To me, the petition is a part of all of those things.”
Vigos’s fight is larger than one woman’s crusade to share childbirth images on Instagram. It signals a deeper problem: our culture’s reluctance to see childbirth, and to see the bodies that give birth. Even in 2018, most pregnant women have no idea what childbirth entails—because they‘ve never seen it.
At the turn of the century, when laboring women entered hospitals, they did so alone. Because of an outsized fear of germs, doctors shaved women’s pubic hair, scrubbed their heads with kerosene, cleaned their nipples and stomachs with ether, and douched them with saline and either whiskey or mercury chloride. These practices were not only unpleasant, but dangerous—often spreading infection rather than thwarting it. By the early 1900s, thanks to the German-conceived birthing craze called “twilight sleep”—in which doctors gave women morphine for pain and erased women’s memories of their labors with a chaser of scopolamine—women weren’t even awake for their own births. (As my grandmother likes to say: “I went to sleep, and when I woke up, I was a mom.”) The practice was later found to endanger infants and mothers. But women abided these tortures alone; partners weren’t allowed in the delivery room.
Gwen Schroeder captured the birth of Kate Gange’s daughter Brienne, in January 2018. Instagram removed the photo.
GWEN SCHROEDER
And photographic documentation was verboten. Doctors didn’t allow women to bring photographers into the delivery room, citing hospital policies and fearing malpractice suits. If a birth was to be photographed, it was usually a home birth.
In recent years, though, delivery rooms have become more accommodating. “For a long time, doctors and midwives said, ‘This is gross. You don’t want a picture of that anyway,’” says Angela Gallo, a doula and birth activist based in Mornington Peninsula, Australia. “That’s changed.” Brooklyn-based birth photographer Gwen Schroeder says she captured a recent birth at which the obstetrician even asked her if she wanted him to move, so she could get a better shot.
In 2012, the New York Times reported on the growing appeal of birth photography, running pictures of birthing women in hairnets and hospital gowns, and photographers crouched behind curtains. Six years later, birth photography is more vérité in style, focused on the raw act of birthing. It’s akin to the difference between a photo of a gymnast posting after her routine’s finish versus a shot of her airborne in a triple pike: the focus isn’t on the product—a baby!—so much as it celebrates the grueling, astonishing act of childbirth itself. Women are naked and laboring in a tub, or on all fours; some clutch a fresh, fluid-covered infant to their breast. Newly empty bellies hang over surgical underwear waistbands. Images capture blood, vulvas, placenta, areola, crowning shots, and inaugural breastfeeding.
Birth photographers join their clients in the hospital around the same time a doula would, during active labor, when women’s contractions are around three to five minutes apart. Denver-based Monet Moutrie has shot about 300 births in the past six years, and says women contact her to shoot their births after seeing her work online. “I don’t just work with crunchy birth-goddess moms,” she told me. “I work with doctors, lawyers; people that five years ago would never have dreamed of doing this. It’s suddenly become a thing.” And it’s not cheap: depending on where you live, a birth photographer can run $1,200 to $1,800; include videography, or hire a more experienced person, and it’s possible to spend $4,000 to $5,000.
Whitney Milton, a mother also based in Denver, hired Moutrie to capture her son’s labor and delivery. “Friends and family asked, ‘Why would you do that? It’s so private,’” Milton said. “Women say, ‘I would never want a picture of that day, because I just didn’t look well.’ My response has always been that this was important for me and my journey to become a mom. This is what I’m most proud of.” Milton’s husband needed convincing, she says. “His first response was, ‘You want what?’” she said. “I explained that this is the moment when my life will change forever. My wedding pictures were important—but not like this.” (Her husband now cherishes their son Nathaniel’s birth images more than their wedding photos, Milton says. The photo book Moutrie gave them of Nathaniel’s birth is now her older daughter’s Harper favorite book.)
Whitney Milton with her newborn son Nathaniel, in April 2017, in a photo deleted by Facebook.
MONET MOUTRIE
It feels like a new moment of empowerment for women, and for childbirth: launching an act that’s occurred behind closed doors onto a social media stage for all to see. Women want to be able to witness and relive one of the most powerful, impossible-seeming things they’ll ever do, and share it with their children. And thanks to the relentless documentation of all aspects of our lives on Instagram and Facebook, it makes sense that more women want their children’s births to get the photographic treatment. Except those very platforms haven’t exactly welcomed this new moment.
After the birth of her son, it took Lauren Archer months to work up the courage to share her half-in-half-out photo. She did it, she says, to educate people, and to share the proudest moment of her life. And she was furious and hurt when her birth photo was removed mere hours later. It felt like Instagram was telling her that “this life-defining moment is more vulgar than the soft-core porn that we leave up,” she told me. “It’s just so heartbreaking. You feel personally wrecked. It makes me want to cry, just thinking about it.”
Facebook and Instagram haven’t just removed photos: since at least 2014, they’ve also banned users who post this content, locking users out of their accounts for a day, a week, or a month. Sometimes, they’ve deleted accounts. Angela Gallo, an Australia-based doula and birth activist, opened Instagram one day in 2015 to find that her account—with dozens of birth photos taken over the years, complete with crowning shots, “blood, poo, and boobs,” she says, because “that’s what birth is about”—no longer existed. “It had all of my pictures of my pregnancy and my daughter’s birth,” Gallo recalls. “That was a huge lesson for me. I had 10,000 followers.” These images also helped market her services, meaning that she lost business promotion, too. But “more than that, I lost all those pictures.”
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For Mother’s Day last year, Moutrie posted a childbirth video montage on her birth photography Facebook page, a crucial marketing tool for her business. Seven months later, and after it had logged millions of views, the montage was removed and she found herself locked out of her account. “Why, all of a sudden am I getting banned? That’s the ridiculousness of it. It’s completely random, and you don’t know it’s coming,” she said. This was her sixth ban; after previous bans, she’d made her husband an administrator on her page. She logged in through his account and posted a plea to the company and her followers: “Facebook, LIFE should never be against your community standards,” she wrote. After five days, her account was reinstated.
Facebook and Instagram wouldn’t provide data for how many photos and videos have been removed in total, and how many accounts have been banned or shut down. According to Karina Newton, Instagram’s Head of Public Policy for the Americas, these images have been removed because they contain nudity and genitalia. Instagram polices nudity via two routes: first, users report posts that they find offensive or objectionable. “Those reports go directly to a team of reviewers around the world, who look at photos and images and stories that have been flagged,” she told me. Those real-life reviewers evaluate—and perhaps remove—photos.
The second route: bots. The platform depends on “machine learning” to automatically filter out content that contains nudity and violates their policies, says Newton. If the image contains over a certain percentage of nudity, it will automatically be taken down. “That’s really to detect porn, and to get it off our platform as soon as possible,” she says. “But it’s complicated, because [the machine learning] is not very sophisticated. It’s basically looking for skin,” says Newton.
Users can appeal removed accounts in the app, Newton says, which triggers a separate human review process. She adds that Instagram works to respond to those appeals quickly. But part of the problem is that it’s unclear what the rules are. Facebook and Instagram both have Community Guidelines policies that prohibit nudity, but despite some terms—“genitalia,” “fully-exposed buttocks”—the instructions are vague, in that they don’t mention childbirth at all.
Birth activists says that sometimes it’s not nudity, but an image’s graphic nature, that leads to its deletion. Vigos says videos of C-sections were removed from the Empowered Birth Project’s Instagram page. “It’s a glaring double standard—when you look at the amount of shocking medical content that is allowed to exist on Instagram,” she says. “All of these pages can show photos of death, abuse, advanced illness, disease, gunshot wounds,” she said. “But birth, the most normal human event, is offensive? That doesn’t make any sense.” (“It’s not really the medical element,” Newton counters. “It’s the genitalia.”)
Instagram deleted this photo of Jennifer Archer, taken by her husband, from the Empowered Birth Project’s account.
JOSÉ GABRIEL BAUZÓ
Once birth photographers started to realize that certain kinds of birth photos triggered a deletion, or led to an account’s ban or removal, many began to self-censor, and use workarounds—editing tools and warning labels— to protect themselves. Birth Becomes Her, an online birth photography training course that Moutrie founded with fellow birth photographer Jennifer Rainy Mason, runs a closed Facebook group for some 110 birth photographers to receive feedback and mentorship on their work, but also tips to prevent photo removal. “It’s friendly and supportive,” Brooklyn birth photographer Gwen Schroeder said. “Like, ‘Darken this corner, because now the eye goes to the baby, instead of the hospital bed.’”
Schroeder recently posted a “half-in-half out” photo in the group that she wanted to use to market her business. “What’s my likelihood of getting banned?” she asked the group. “Is it cool enough to be worth the risk?” They affirmed that it was, and suggested reducing the effect of the hospital’s overhead light to provide more cover for the mother and deter Instagram’s modesty police. Schroeder made the edits and posted the image on Instagram in a slideshow, behind a pink card that reads “Sensitive Content. This photo contains raw, emotional imagery from a beautiful birth.” The photo was removed anyway.
In early January 2018, a month after her Change.org petition was first published, Vigos got the call she had been waiting for, from Facebook’s Associate Manager of Public Policy, Kim Malfacini. Vigos says Malfacini thanked her for her work and told her that Facebook and Instagram’s policy would be changing to allow birth content. There was no clear start date—just a promise.
Facebook’s and Instagram’s decision to change their policy is the result of years of conversations with women’s health advocates and the birthing community, Instagram’s Karina Newton told HarpersBazaar.com exclusively. It’s also personally important to her as a mother of two, she says: “We’re really proud that Instagram’s nudity policy is evolving to allow for that community, and for moms and families to share photos and videos of childbirth.”
Newton says that Instagram and Facebook are improving their machine learning system to distinguish between nudity and childbirth. “The goal is to have a smarter system so we’re not taking down birthing imagery in the same way that we’re taking down nudity that might be uploaded to our platform,” Newton says. They’re also re-training their staff to prevent photo removal: Instagram’s and Facebook’s global team of content reviewers will no longer remove childbirth content that gets reported, she says.
Monet Moutrie’s photo of Natalie Mino, giving birth in March 2015, was deleted by Facebook.
MONET MOUTRIE
Vigos is overjoyed that the petition won. “They’re no longer censoring my page at all,” she told me. “I’m seeing a lot of birth-related content that’s more graphic staying up.
“This is a matter of women fully stepping into their power as creators,” she says. “For women to see a baby coming out of a vagina—to be able to see that and think, ‘If that’s possible, then anything is possible’—they can take that knowledge and power, and apply it to any other realm of their lives.”
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