Birth | Videos

In a culture that sells us fertility as a lifestyle brand (ovulation trackers, “bump-friendly” athleisure, push-present jewelry) and then hides the actual carnage of labor behind hospital curtains, birth videos perform a radical act: they show that you can be terrified, ripped, screaming, covered in fluids, utterly unsexy, and still, at the end of it, hold a human being and laugh.

By 2007, YouTube had its first viral birth video: a water birth set to Enya’s “Only Time.” It had 2 million views and a comment section that oscillated between “beautiful miracle” and “I just threw up my cereal.” The genre had arrived. birth videos