A Houston hospital made history on Wednesday by giving the public a front-row seat to a cesarean section birth through social media.
The public relations team at Memorial Hermann Hospital brought a video camera into the delivery room and broadcast a live feed of the birth over Twitter.
Play-by-play moves performed by Dr. Anne Gonzalez as she cut open her patient’s swollen belly and pulled out a 6 pound 1 ounce boy was sent out in 140-character tweets loaded with video clips.
The mother’s face was never shown and her name never revealed, but every detail of the surgery—the anesthesia needle going into the spine, the scalpel cutting into the abdomen, and the baby’s head poking through the incision—was shared.
The footage is graphic, and, depending on your comfort level with blood, either beautiful or gory. Thankfully a tweet from the hospital forewarned anyone who is squeamish.
This certainly isn’t the first time live video footage of a child birth has been shared via social media. In October 2011, a Canadian woman invited the public to watch her home birth live online and ever since a smattering of social media savvy moms have further propelled the trend. But this seems to be the first time a hospital and its PR team was behind the effort.
“It’s fascinating to pull back the curtain on the mystery of the OR,” Natalie Camarata, the social media manager at Houston’s Hermann Memorial Hospital, told the Daily Mail. ‘“They can see every piece… these step-by-step processes that are something that happen every day. It really demystifies it.”
Camarata estimates that 72,000 people watched the birth live on Twitter. When Memorial Hermann live tweeted a brain surgery, more than 235,000 watched.
Here’s a look at the most exciting video clip, when doctors pull the baby from the abdomen, and to view all of the footage head over to memorialhermann.org.
