No posture is permitted during labor. Due to the wide variety of topics that can be covered, birth photography is ideal for documentary storytelling. It’s all about the little things and feelings: the wounded glances, the laughter between contractions, and the emotive texts you receive. Holding hands, rubbing each other’s shoulders, and relying on one another for support

Late last year, Facebook and Instagram ceased censoring posts about childbirth and st mothers as a result of the activism of women such as Katie Vigos of the Empowered Birth Project. Previously, the social media titans deemed birth images to be too graphic and against their policies against nudity. But Vigos (and the over 23,000 individuals who signed her Change.org petition) believed that by censoring birth, the platforms were reinforcing the s, st, st t surrounding it.

Vigos told Harper’s Bazaar, “You either enable reproduction to exist on your platform, or you don’t.” “The petition is representative of our much bigger mission to empower ourselves as women—whether it’s about our bodily autonomy, our ability to birth with informed decisions and support, censorship of our bodies, the de-stigmatization of menstruation.”

Today, a fast search of the hashtags #birthisbeautiful or #birthwithoutfear returns hundreds of images of newborns entering the world. To demonstrate the power of capturing the moment, we have compiled over twelve of the most breathtaking images of birth by some of our favorite photographers.