Rebecca Moore questions whether we need to share the gory details about giving birth

Pregnancy – it’s everywhere. As though the whole of humanity may never be allowed to forget how they entered this blessed situation we apparently have to be surrounded on all sides by pregnant women. Or by pregnant friends haunting social media with daily updates on their morning sickness. Or television shows of women giving birth.

Now, don’t get me wrong – I actually love getting updates from friends especially when they inevitably foreshadow cute baby pictures and even cuter real life baby cuddles.

But why on earth do we need to see women squatting on forest floors, naked and in agony all so that a TV company can produce a show about natural births in natural surroundings? The new show will – rather inventively – be called Born in the Wild and will be shot in rivers and forests across the US.

But for safety reasons they will be forests near hospitals, the producers assure us. And with medics on hand, they confirm. So… not really natural and in the wild then. These women obviously want the world to see them writhing in agony, naked, and struggling through on no pain relief so they may be universally called Earth Mothers. This is until there’s even the smallest technical hitch, of course, and then they’ll be straight to A&E. Unless this TV show is for mothers who can’t really afford the disgraceful price of healthcare in the US and have had to resort to giving birth like a wolf, howling with pain by a river, so a production company funds their medical treatment should they require it. If the NHS is ever criticised we can now at least use the justification that none of our women are braying in pain under an English oak somewhere.

However, I guess this publicity stunt is fitting for the media intensive 21st century: if a baby’s born in the middle of a forest and no one’s around to film it, was it really born? Apparently not.

A new baby must at least be tweeted and Facebooked about in order to truly exist. Last week, I stumbled across one woman’s Twitter feed, creatively tagged #lyndseygivesbirth and #labour, in which one woman documented her 12-hour labour, culminating, of course, in a pale, gunk-covered face shot of Baby Fearne.

The #labour tweets start off with gentle wonderings about whether Lyndsey is actually in labour, swiftly followed by the update that she is now in situ in the labour ward. She seems very happy about it. What follows are various photos of her husband zonked out on the bed, and her reporting on very important information that us women should probably know about before getting ourselves into similar circumstances.

Rather helpfully Lyndsey informs us that labour ‘hurts like hell’. Thank goodness Lyndsey had her smart phone with her in the labour ward to reel off those wise words. If she hadn’t, generations of women would be woefully unaware that squeezing a whole person though your tiny private parts may smart a bit. Phew. At least now I have all the information and can proceed with extreme caution. Lyndsey was, I noted, formerly a marketing executive. One can only presume she’s taken to marketing her own procreation abilities. I know from friends that the whole labour ward experience usually involves hours of intense boredom peppered rather too frequently with pain so intense it makes you want to pass out.

But that’s not excuse for taking to Twitter. We don’t need a blow-by-blow account of labour.

Those who already have babies don’t need to the reminded. And those of us who don’t, really could do without the terrifying build-up.