As someone who was in labor for over 35 hours, let me be the first to say that whatever support person is allowed into the room with a birthing person—for me, it was my husband—is expected to be, well, supportive. Seems easy enough, right? Well, apparently not.
In a photo going viral on Reddit, a person is shown enjoying a slice of pizza while their significant other is clearly in the middle of a painful contraction. Of course labor can take some time and a person's got to eat, but read the room, bro! And whether the photo's staged or a joke or not, Redditors, naturally, jumped on the opportunity to call this person out.
"Yeah no, this isn't funny," u/Perperrins commented. "The woman is obviously in a tremendous amounts of pain and I don't think It's appropriate to be making jokes. To the people who seem incapable of empathizing, imagine this; a man badly fractures his leg and is in hospital with his wife about to get an Xray. The man is in distress, the wife whips out her phone, takes a picture of him keeled over in pain while showing off a kitkat bar. She then posts it on the internet with the caption "Need a break? Have a Kitkat." She would be shamed to oblivion, the amount of people defending her would be minimal, as it should be."
Though many more users weighed in with their outrage over the situation, other commenters found it funny and even suggested that the woman could have been in on the whole thing.
"What if his SO likes the smell of pizza and the smell calms her down," one user questioned. "It doesn’t appear to be working," another user replied.
It's important to remember that we don't have context around what's actually happening in the photo, so there's no real way to know if the mom-to-be was in on the joke. But a good rule of thumb would be not to mimic this setup if you know what's good for you.
"I had Subway while I was waiting for my son to be born," one Redditor admitted. "When you hear about a 12 hour labor, about 11 of those hours are mostly just waiting."
While that may very well be true—except, umm, the person in labor isn't just waiting around!—the support person should find out in advance—and check in again during labor and delivery—what's OK and what's not. While I had absolutely no appetite when I was in labor and urged my husband to eat whatever he wanted, not everyone's experience is the same. For some parents-to-be, seeing a significant other or support person chow down on a delicious meal while they're shoveling ice chips into their mouths isn't exactly in the birth plan.
And though some commenters were annoyed by the picture and others found it hilarious, there's one thing almost everyone agreed on: Who the heck cuts their pizza like that?!