Why People are Soft Launching Their Babies Online
Pregnancy and birth are one of the most intimate and sacred experiences, yet pregnancy itself is very visible, public, and subject to critique.
Pregnancy announcements, especially on social media, have become a societal norm. It can create the feeling for some that birthers share every aspect of their pregnancies with us—due dates, registry items, baby names, whether they will chestfeed or opt for formula, with the public often judging every decision. The mix of birth, parenthood, and the intense criticism that is the norm for social media interactions make for a toxic brew.
It’s easy to forget that birthers are not solely hosts for babies to grow, but are still people who deserve complete autonomy with how they share or choose not to share their pregnancies and births. More and more, in the face of all this, people are choosing to keep their pregnancies off social media.
“Giving birth is already a revolution, because our society is not a pro-natal society. It is not a society that cares at all about birthing people,” Brittany Packnett Cunningham, an analyst on MSNBC and host of the podcast UNDISTRACTED, tells BAZAAR.com.
Packnett Cunningham’s decision to keep her pregnancy private was a choice, one affected by a miscarriage at the end of 2020. “I was so thrilled and so scared, all at the same time,” she says. “To avoid those conversations, to avoid more heartbreak, and frankly to avoid more stress coming off of a wild year, I just wanted to hold it, keep it to myself for as long as possible to make sure that this thing really was sure.”
As a Black woman in social justice and a public figure, 2020 and 2021 were stressful, Packnett Cunningham explains. “The last thing I wanted to do was add the stress of other people’s expectations, because I had been under the weight of other people's expectations all year long.” Privacy was about honoring the space she created to ensure a healthy pregnancy.
Eventually, she shared her pregnancy with some of her closest friends on a trip. She was surprised that sharing the news allowed her to release some of her fears for her baby’s survival. “Being able to tell people in person and not being expected to make some kind of Internet announcement to friends, strangers, associates, former friends, high school classmates … once I relieved myself of that, I relieved myself of undue stress,” she says.
Whitney Mitchell, a social strategist, explains that her pregnancy became motivation during a time when she felt stagnant. Prior to pregnancy, Mitchell shared her travel adventures and her photography on social media. But announcing her pregnancy felt strange in the midst of the pandemic.
“Beyond that, even if it wasn’t COVID, I had heard so many stories of Black and Brown women dying when they were giving birth or losing their child before birth even happened, and so I really wanted to make sure that that journey was mine to own with my partner and my family in case those things happened, so that they were the first to receive that information,” she says.
Both Packnett Cunningham and Mitchell knew they needed space to define mothering on their own terms. “I needed to wrap my head around, ‘What does being a mother mean?’ Because you see all these definitions, and you see all these people … and I hadn’t attached it to myself,” Mitchell says.
“It was a conscious decision to not give that to the world, because there are so many people that follow me that I don’t necessarily know. It felt very personal and it felt sacred, in that it was happening at that time where life was being lost and I was growing this life,” she adds.
“I needed space for myself if I was going to be able to fully grow new life,” Packnett Cunningham says. The quiet around her pregnancy made her more intentional about the kind of parent she was going to be and allowed her to focus her energy on prioritizing her well-being.
The privacy also gave these mothers the ability to share their news with those physically around them and present in their everyday lives. Andrea Landry, a life skills coach and First Nations University instructor, chose to share with only those closest to her and her partner to honor the sacredness of the pregnancy, traditional kinship systems, and practices of the Anishinaabe people.
“We’re very private with the sacred. … We’ve always kept that to ourselves. … It’s the same with having a newborn baby. How we nurture this baby, how we bond with our baby is between ourselves and Creator,” she says.
Landry also expresses similar sentiments as Mitchell about sharing the news of her pregnancy on social media. “We’re living in a time where it’s so easy to be laterally violent to each other, to have bad thoughts about each other, to judge and minimize each other, and I think social media makes those thoughts and that energy more susceptible to people,” Landry says.
Black and Brown women existing fully as themselves online face constant scrutiny of their womanhood, surveillance, and online abuse. Leslie Jones, Duchess Meghan, Naomi Osaka, and countless other Black and Brown women have been subjected to online abuse for years. The Washington Post reported that Facebook (which owns Instagram) knew its algorithms were biased, disproportionately harming Black and Brown users, and subjecting them to derogatory and racist language. Amnesty International found that women of color were 34 percent more likely to be mentioned in abusive tweets than white women and that Black women were 84 percent more likely to be mentioned in abusive tweets than white women.
Black and Brown creators, especially in social justice spaces, face a tricky bargain: They’ve often built a voice and livelihood out of sharing aspects of their personal experiences online, yet the ugly history of Black and Brown maternity in this country means sharing about their pregnancies becomes especially fraught. When they post about the cultural minefield of pregnancy, all those ugly legacies—like state-sanctioned Indian boarding schools, Jane Crow, and the assumptions of Black parental neglect used to justify slavery—rear up in the comments section.
By intentionally being private about their pregnancies, Black and Brown women are choosing reproductive autonomy to protect themselves from the echoes of state-sanctioned violence. They’re choosing privacy to protect themselves from online abuse and scrutiny about how they bring life into the world.
Packnett Cunningham gave birth to her son at 24 weeks and spent 116 days in the NICU. “Knowing that we had an intimate, God-selected group of people that were holding us … it was clear to me that holding this close to the chest was divinely ordered,” she says.
Mitchell and Packnett Cunningham slowly began sharing the news of their babies' births with those around them in real life and being selective about who would be part of their communities moving forward.
“I was able to reintroduce intimate, personal relationships into this sacred time of my life instead of everything having to be for the Internet,” Packnett Cunningham says.
Mitchell had no intention of sharing the news of her daughter’s birth because of how sacred her pregnancy and journey to motherhood was, she explains, but decided to because she was having encounters with people who had no idea she had a child. Most importantly, she never wanted her daughter to think she wasn’t proud to be her mother.
“I wanted to protect whatever growth that she will have and my family will have, because the Internet is a wonderful place of connection, but it could also be a horrible place of projection,” she says.
Mothering, “which includes anyone who is engaged in the practice of creating, nurturing, affirming, and supporting life,” Angela Garbes writes in Essential Labor, is a sacred act.
In a society where the lives of Black women, Brown women, marginalized people, and people of the global majority are not valued in comparison to our white counterparts, it’s radical and revolutionary that we choose to bring life into this world.
There is no perfect way to mother. It is equal parts intuition and learning as you go. “When you become a mother, you engender life, endless possibilities. Mothering is creative in a very literal sense—it is cultivating all that potential, bringing a small person into consciousness,” Garbes writes. If you should choose to mother, do it on your terms and design the journey for yourself, instead of following a predetermined path created by others.
You Might Also Like
