Twitter Employee Live Tweets Her Baby’s Birth Because … Twitter

On April 5, Twitter employee Claire Diaz-Ortiz — known to her 333,000 followers as @Claire — made the following announcement:

Thus began a string of 27 tweets — not including retweeted commentary by the likes of Christy Turlington and America Ferrera — of @Claire’s 12 hour journey from having her water break to giving birth.

Complete with its own #inlabor hashtag, the string of Twitter updates discussed the speed of her contractions:

The difficulties she and her husband faced on the ride to the hospital:

How awkward it was that people kept asking her what she was going to name the child:

How similar her doctor looked to Bethenny Frankel:

And what she would do with the placenta:

The end result was a new baby girl:

Ten minutes after she bid Twitter a momentary adieu, Diaz-Ortiz provided her followers with a necessary picture (and responded to her followers’ questions):

This is not an isolated live-tweeting labor incident. Mothers-to-be and doctors have taken to social networks to share the birthing process for different reasons. To some, sharing intimate details about contractions and dilation seems as natural as sharing pictures of Sunday brunch.

It was natural for Bravo’s Pregnant in Heels reality star Rosie Pope to live tweet her birth to her fan-base in 2012, after all, they had just watched a broadcast of her pregnancy.

Ruth Iorio live-tweeted and Instagrammed her labor to make a political point about homebirths.”In the US. The natural homebirthers are divided into the crunchy-granola-munchers and then there are the epidural lot who don’t question going to hospital. I don’t fit either of those stereotypes. I’m somewhere in the middle,” she told The Telegraph:

Even a hospital in Houston live-tweeted a C-section for educational (and let’s face it, PR) purposes last August:

With babies being named Hashtag, social media has fully integrated into the human lifecycle.