Over the summer, Sara Morishige Williams, the wife of the CEO of Twitter, tweeted while giving birth . A Minnesota woman named Lynsee has taken the natal overshare to the next level: She broadcast a video of herself giving birth on a local social networking site called MomsLikeMe and interacted with viewers while she was in labor. 23-year-old Lynsee, who would not give out her last name in order to protect her privacy (which apparently was not an issue when she decided to push out a person in front of thousands of other people), told ABCNews.com, “If I were in a classroom, I’d be teaching about development. It was a way for me to teach … A way for me to use myself as a textbook.”
Of course, there are actual textbooks and myriad shows on television that show the wonder of natural childbirth (see TLC’s Birth Day and MTV’s 16 and Pregnant ). What bothers me about ABCNews’ framing of Lynsee’s story is that it assumes that she is merely a product of Generation Y, and that her contemporaries would see nothing wrong with broadcasting their births for anyone with an Internet connection to see. The article quotes Julie Taylor from the website MomLogic , who says of twentysomething moms, “For them, they’ve video-taped most of their lives anyway and they’ve grown up on reality TV. So maybe it’s an old-fashioned notion to think twice.” No, it’s not an old fashioned notion. Most people of any generation don’t want to be talking to curious strangers in the minutes between contractions.
