Dear Facebook, please stop censoring powerful images of childbirth.

#Liberated + #Confidence

These are words that describe Kim Kardashian West when she posts images of her beautiful body on Facebook. Her sexy naked body images have close to a half a MILLION likes. Trust me with that much traffic these images are getting reported but somehow they are still up. Even though the following image is directly against Facebook’s nudity rules: “We remove photographs of people displaying genitals or focusing in on fully exposed buttocks,” Facebook keeps these images coming into news feeds because sexualizing women is important for our society to keep on oppressing women.

I wish my clients and other women could feel #Liberated and have #Confidence with their unsexual birth images. I keep thinking the world has changed and we are no longer shoving “women’s issues” behind closed doors.

But then I wake up to find a message from Facebook saying that I have been banned for 30 days and my business page, with 22,000 followers that I worked really hard to aquire, is going to be unpublished because I posted an educational image of a baby being born.

This image did not show “full buttocks” and definitely did not contain “sexual content.” The image that they removed showed a powerful woman catching her own baby standing up, there was a bit of the bottom of my clients bum, thighs, baby’s head…. and some blood.

When I posted this image on Facebook 2 weeks ago it got a lot of traffic. I think it was viewed by almost a MILLION people. I got lots of messages from women that felt empowered to catch their own baby or try birthing standing up after seeing this image. I am sure my image was reported when I first posted it. But two weeks later, Facebook’s algorithms picked it up and determined it was against FB’s Community Standards around nudity, even though it is fully in the limits of the nudity criteria. This happened to me twice in November 2015 over images that were also within Facebook’s nudity requirements.

WHY IS THIS HAPPENING????????

Today I woke up to a message that my business page Apple Blossom Families would be unpublished, this is after only being banned a handful of times since 2013, for images that were always within FB’s Community Standards. I don’t have a contact person that I can defend my image to at Facebook. I just have to sit out my 30 days of silence and wait for my business page to disappear.

We need to be able to share images of our babies being born in ways that can inspire women to take charge of their births. To be able to do this we need to be able to share images that show a bit of leg and maybe a bit of blood. We need to not feel scared and oppressed by Facebook’s lack of education around women’s bodies acting in a natural way. I want to spend my days inspiring women about birth, not fighting the world’s largest social media platform when I share images of women being powerful.

How do we make CHANGE and how do we get access to the correct people so we can defend our birth images?

Please start the conversation so woman can stop feeling oppressed and can keep having education on birth choices. I know I am not alone there are 100,000 of people behind me on this. Get with the times Facebook its 2016, women are way more than sexual objects, we are amazing creatures that create life and we want to freely share it with each other so we can learn about birth in a healthy way.

Download one of these images or make your own. Repost it to FB and use the hashtag #FbStopCensoringBirth and share, share, share. Hopefully Facebook will bring back my original posts, business page and change the way they are removing images from our feeds. Please use the @AppleBlossomFamilies in your post so Facebook knows what page they removed.

Here are my other blog posts about being banned from Facebook back in November 2015 here and here.

#FBstopbullying #motherhood #discrimination #educationstartshere #notjustforsex #womansbodiesrock #birth #education #2016 #womenaremorethansexual #birthisbeautiful #birthisnotporn #birthphotography #birthphotographer

Here is a review of Facebook’s Community Standards around Nudity.

This post originally appeared on Apple Blossom Families.