My Instagram Birth Art

ISSN 2516-5852 (Online)

AIMS Journal, 2022, Vol 34, No 4

To read or download this Journal as a PDF. Please click here.

Picture of a pregnant Hannah walking up a hill

By Hannah Wood

This is a picture of a pregnant me walking up a hill in the Gower a few weeks before my daughter was born. Drawing and painting aren’t really my skills, so I used digital art techniques instead. It was fine to size it to an Instagram (IG) template as I’ve just started using IG myself as part of my creative life.

It’s a picture of me doing outdoors stuff – I had a really easy pregnancy and kept active right up until the end, although it helped having my daughter arrive early. I’d never considered that as a possibility as they always tell you that first babies are likely to be later than expected.

So while I definitely enjoyed being pregnant and I felt bonded to my child, I also felt that I had a science experiment going on in my tummy which made me use the diagram for my unborn child, remembering school biology. And I was aware that the science felt interesting to me – that feeling of excitement and wonder and not knowing how it’s going to turn out. But it did also feel like a lot of people wanted to make observations, take readings, and have opinions about something that was very personal and part of me.

The other strong and ‘real’ element of this picture is the photo of me cradling B, and I’m walking towards this. For me, pregnant and looking ahead, it would be science that would turn the nebulous concept of a child inside me into something more concrete, but something that I also knew very little about.

Again and again when I was making this piece of art, I tried to balance the two contrasts of knowing and not knowing, strong and soft, and both of them playing out together as I gave birth.

I think that not knowing was a lot less comfortable when I translated it into thinking about the birth. There seemed to be so many variables in it, and so much conflicting information. I felt that it could be a very rational experience with medical methods and statistics and a birth plan, and that was how I was leaning in my head. I wanted it to be my way, but my way by all the scientific guidance. This is the route that comes from my head, with thought clouds and a clipboard and how I thought it would be before I gave birth.

The second route comes from my heart, as I look back on giving birth now and a lot of the time the process was being managed by my instincts, from somewhere inside me that just felt its way through. I think if I’d known this when I was pregnant, I’d have taken much more care of that part of me. Trusted it more, and advocated for it more assertively.

And I think now I’ve come back to working for AIMS, that this is what I want championed in maternity services – the balance between evidence-based processes around physiology with the support and cherishing of the parts of birth that can’t easily be put into words and numbers. This picture tries to encompass that, and it’s made me think of the times since that I’ve slowly learned to take notice of my instincts and ask for those things too.


Author Bio: Hannah is a mum to a teenage daughter and a rescue tabby all living in a muddly house in the West Country. She loves gardening and making things and is always working to make more time for both.


The AIMS Journal spearheads discussions about change and development in the maternity services..

AIMS Journal articles on the website go back to 1960, offering an important historical record of maternity issues over the past 60 years. Please check the date of the article because the situation that it discusses may have changed since it was published. We are also very aware that the language used in many articles may not be the language that AIMS would use today.

To contact the editors, please email: journal@aims.org.uk

We make the AIMS Journal freely available so that as many people as possible can benefit from the articles. If you found this article interesting please consider supporting us by becoming an AIMS member or making a donation. We are a small charity that accepts no commercial sponsorship, in order to preserve our reputation for providing impartial, evidence-based information.

JOIN AIMS

MAKE A DONATION

Buy AIMS a Coffee with Ko-Fi

AIMS supports all maternity service users to navigate the system as it exists, and campaigns for a system which truly meets the needs of all.

Latest Content

Journal

« »

Pregnancy and hearing: Did you know…

AIMS Journal, 2024, Vol 36, No 4 Did you know that one in three pregnant women develop tinnitus compared with one in ten who are not pregnant? Tinnitus is the sensation o…

Read more

Editorial: Hello and welcome. How a…

AIMS Journal, 2024, Vol 36, No 4 By Alex Smith Welcome to the December 2024 edition of the AIMS journal. The theme for this quarter considers the experience of care for d…

Read more

Welcome to the Deaf Community – a l…

AIMS Journal, 2024, Vol 36, No 4 By a hearing mother of a deaf baby Sat in the hospital ward, I snapped a cute picture on my phone of my tiny little newborn wearing a hea…

Read more

Events

« »

AIMS Workshop: The Foundation Stone…

Join us for an interactive online AIMS workshop: " The Foundation Stones for Supporting the Physiological Process in Pregnancy and Birth ". Tickets available here: https:…

Read more

MuM-PreDiCT Dissemination event

MuM-PreDiCT is a UK-wide research programme funded by the Medical Research Council. The project focuses on understanding how multiple long-term conditions affect women, b…

Read more

AIMS Workshop: Focusing on Inductio…

Join us for an interactive online AIMS workshop, " Focusing on Induction of Labour ". Tickets available here: https://www.tickettailor.com/events/aims/1472572 Nadia Higso…

Read more

Latest Campaigns

« »

AIMS Letter to Wes Streeting

AIMS has written to Wes Streeting MP, welcoming him to the role of Secretary of State for Health and Social Care. We acknowledge his awareness that maternity services are…

Read more

Involving Service User Voices in Ma…

This is an edited version of an invited talk given by Jo Dagustun, AIMS Campaigns Team, to the International Labour and Birth Research Conference UK, 24 - 26 April 2023.…

Read more

Birth Trauma Inquiry Open Letter in…

We write this letter in response to the recently published APPG Report on Birth Trauma which can be found here The report was extremely moving and we honour the brave con…

Read more