Your C-section doesn’t belong on Instagram

I should have had a choice but instead I ending up seeing something on my friend’s Instagram that I now can’t put out of my mind, writes Lanai Scarr.

I cannot unsee it.

Without warning, while scrolling through Instagram Stories Wednesday night, suddenly I was watching a baby being pulled from the stomach of an acquaintance I went to high school with.

The blood, the gore, the baby — half in, half out of her stomach — half born. Blue and red and screaming. A Caesarian birth, in 15-second Instagram Story bites.

The woman, who is a genuinely lovely person, had posted the video of her birth to social media.

Her baby being pulled from her. Her seconds-old son being held up by the neck by her surgeon, her bare cut open stomach and legs splayed in hospital gowns and surgical instruments and tape. It was all posted for the world to see.

MORE FROM RENDEZVIEW: The world doesn’t deserve Instagram

As I sat there, contemplating what I had just viewed, I felt a little sick in my stomach. Given the rolling nature of the Instagram Stories function, I had gone from watching a story of a birthday barbecue to suddenly watching a human give birth.

I’m not a prude, nor am I averse to watching the odd medical television show.

I’ve had four kids. One vaginally and the other three, triplets, via Caesarian.

But those were my births and I wasn’t in a rush to look over the curtain, either.

The birth of a baby is a precious moment, but that doesn’t mean it belongs on social media. Picture: iStock

But by virtue of having an Instagram account and buying into social media I did not sign up to see the birth of the second child of a girl I once attended high school with.

I cannot remove the images from my brain, and to be honest, I think it might be the last straw for me.

I’ve been slowly trying to detox from social media since New Year’s Eve. I wanted to live in the moment, so I’ve been checking it less and posting sparingly.

Then when I came back to work from holidays recently, I justified that I would need to access it more due to work. But I genuinely believe social media is turning us all into egotistical, over-sharing monsters.

MORE FROM RENDEZVIEW: I’m sick of being told I was ‘too posh to push’

Rather than living in the now we are thinking about getting the best picture or what our next post will say. We are sharing our most intimate moments with acquaintances and desiring their constant validation. Our self-worth is tied up with how many comments and likes we have on a post.

I truly believe it’s impossible to have more than 20 close friends that you talk to daily and want to spend time with always.

Our obsession with sharing our lives and bodies is turning us into narcissistic monsters. Picture: iStock

You can absolutely have more friends than that, but are those 200-or so acquaintances or work colleagues we all often collect on our social media accounts really the ones that deserve to know what the inside of your bedroom looks like, how you look first thing in the morning, or what your child looks like as they’re being pulled out of you in surgery? Will it start being acceptable to insta-story the conception of a baby soon?

And where are the social media companies in all of this? Why are they not more accountable for the content they are allowing people to post?

My high school acquaintance does not have a private account. Anyone can access her page, and thus the videos of her birth.

MORE FROM RENDEZVIEW: Instagram gives cruelty a whole new platform

Why is Instagram not moderating stories before they are published? And if they are, why is that content acceptable? Why is it okay that I had that thrust in my face without any warning?

At least when people watched Kourtney Kardashian pulling her son from her vagina via Keeping up with the Kardashians there was some sort of notice of what you were going to see at the beginning of the episode. It wasn’t a surprise, she was filming her birth.

I think it’s time as a society we all take a good hard look at ourselves and what social media is turning us into.

And I think we’re getting worse in determining what is and isn’t OK to post. Before you know it, like me, you could be you watching an Instagram Story of the Caesarian birth of an acquaintance in all its gory detail.

And in my opinion that’s not okay.

Lanai Scarr is a senior writer for News Corp.

@pollietracker

Originally published as Your C-section doesn’t belong on Instagram