A Birth Photographer Shamed This Mom For Having A C-Section

The last time we checked, giving birth is giving birth, no matter how the baby vacates the premises. But apparently one birth photographer doesn’t see it that way—and her former client is calling her out.

A screenshot of texts between a pregnant woman and the person she had scheduled to be her birth photographer went viral after being posted on Friday to the Facebook page Sanctimommy. (In case you’re not familiar with it, Sanctimommy fights back against people who shame moms.) In the exchange, the mom-to-be gets unceremoniously dumped by her photog after she reveals that she’s going to have a C-section.


“I didn’t ‘opt’ for anything,” the mom wrote. “I had no idea birth photographers discriminated people for how they birth their babies but that’s good to know.”
The photographer’s reply shows she clearly needs to take a class in customer relations. “A surgery isn’t birth my dear,” she said. “You aren’t giving birth. You are having surgery to remove your baby from your abdomen. That is not birth no matter how you swing it and I for one don’t want to be there to take pictures of it.”

It didn’t stop there. “If you decide to give motherhood a go from the get and have an actual birth, let me know and we can schedule your session.” She also shamed the mom for “cutting corners so early in the game.”

Um…last time we checked, babies that are delivered via C-section aren’t any less born than those that are delivered vaginally. C-sections also involve surgery and all of the recovery involved with that, which isn’t exactly a cake-walk (think pain, inability to do heavy lifting, staple removal, bowel irritation, and other fun happenings). One mom detailed the reality of having a C-section birth in August, and it sounded like anything but the easy way out. “This was the most painful thing I have experienced in my life,” she wrote in her post. “I now belong to a badass tribe of mamas with the scar to prove that I had a baby cut out of me and lived to tell the tale.”
Kudos to this mom for calling her ex-photographer out.