Candid Birth & Connecting with Your Body, with Emma Armstrong, The Naked Doula
Candid Birth & Connecting with Your Body, with Emma Armstrong, The Naked Doula
S4 E3
With social media platforms increasingly censoring candid images of birth and women’s bodies, I got together this week with The Naked Doula, Emma Armstrong, to talk about why we need to see real women’s experiences online. Our wide-ranging chat touches on using the correct words for female anatomy in schools, how we set realistic expectations for birth, and how reconnecting with your body through periods, birth and the menopause is truly empowering.
Emma Armstrong is a mother, a birth coach and a talented illustrator. Her new book, The Fearless Birth Book, can be found on her website www.thenakeddoula.com
You can share your views and experiences of censorship of women's bodies on social media as part of the CensHERship campaign here - https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSef_zhCZBkjLfIr46XkedZ2vSu6JtF5I_XVl33Lm4yQdWNFVQ/viewform
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TRANSCRIPT (AI Generated)
“You're listening to the Birth-ed Podcast. I'm your host and founder of Birth-ed, Megan Rossiter. If you're looking for the evidence, the nuance, the detail that's missing from your antinatal appointments, then I've got your back.
The Birth-ed Podcast is here to help you sort the facts from the advertising, the instinct from the influences, and the information you're looking for from the white noise of the internet. I hope you've got a cup of tea in hand and a notepad at the ready. Let's dive in.
Hi everybody, welcome back to the Birth-ed Podcast. I am really excited to be joined today by my friend and fellow birth geek, Emma Armstrong. You may know Emma as founder of The Naked Dula.
She is a hypnobirthing coach, a doula, a mom of two, and now author and illustrator of The Fearless Birth Book, which came out yesterday, well, yesterday as you're hearing it, not yesterday as we're recording it. It's Tuesday and it's coming out on Thursday. So Emma, welcome.
Thank you so much for joining me. And congratulations, how are you feeling?
“Thank you so much. I'm feeling really excited. Do you know what's really funny?
Because when you say illustrator, I always think it's so accidental. I'm an accidental illustrator.
Well, I wrote author and then I was like, hang on, no, you're not just the author of it. And when you see the book, it is well and truly illustrated.
Oh my God. I think that's what just sets it apart. But yeah, honestly, completely accidental illustrator.
You're a bloody good illustrator for somebody that has, I definitely couldn't accidentally illustrate like that. So yeah, congratulations. So Emma and I wanted to get together this week, I suppose to sort of publicly extend a conversation that we've had behind the scenes, like many, many times about something that has affected both of our work.
I mean, ultimately for as long as we have connected and been sharing birth information online, but certainly I would say more so in the past few months. And this is the censorship of birth and women's health information being shared online. So if you follow either my work or Emma's work or both, you'll know that we both share pretty candid imagery and videos.
“Most of the time mine's an illustration.
Not even like a graphic photo like Aisha, but literally like a cartoon drawing of it. But yeah, time and time again, whether that is the photos, the videos or literally the illustrations, these are being removed by the platforms that we're sharing them on, despite there being kind of clear guidance saying that they are allowed in the name of education. So Emma, you're probably a bit like me now where you can see or you can draw pretty much any image of birth or a human body and not bat an eyelid.
I think it was probably the third or fourth time supporting a woman in labor that I literally just stopped noticing nakedness. I think they say that it's a bit like how dentists see teeth, like you just don't notice anymore. But I understand that the first time somebody comes across an image like this, it can be quite confronting, can make them feel quite uncomfortable.
But it's certainly not something that we are kind of used to seeing. So should we start there as our kind of, I suppose, our opening point, like why are we, I would[…]”
From The birth-ed podcast: Candid Birth & Connecting with Your Body, with Emma Armstrong, 10 May 2024
https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/the-birth-ed-podcast/id1485321117?i=1000655112110
This material may be protected by copyright.
From The birth-ed podcast: Candid Birth & Connecting with Your Body, with Emma Armstrong, 10 May 2024
https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/the-birth-ed-podcast/id1485321117?i=1000655112110
This material may be protected by copyright.