Giving birth is one of the most intimate moments in a woman’s life where only immediate family and some friends get to witness the miracle of life. Women even banned their husbands from the delivery room at one time to keep their labor behind closed hospital doors. British woman Lyndsey Thomas, 34, did not just invite her family and friends, but millions of strangers into her delivery room via social networking site, Twitter.

“When I got there I thought, ‘what can I do to pass a few hours before it all kicks off?” said Thomas, the Daily Mail reported. “‘I wanted to capture as much as I could, even during my contractions. It was a way of keeping my mind off the pain and telling friends what was happening.” The mother-to-be began to have contractions before arriving at Whittington Hospital, which soon all of the world would know about as she live-tweeted.

Not long after the former marketing executive arrived at the hospital did she begin to post pictures of herself, the hospital staff, and her husband Iain Thomas, using the hashtag #Lyndseygivesbirth, so friends and family could easily follow her birth. Thomas admits documenting her birth was a “social experiment,” to see what the reaction would be like. “Everyone was very positive. People were even guessing the weight and the time I would give birth. The staff were all talking about it too,” she told the Daily Mail.

The Twitter birth also showed Thomas receiving an epidural anesthesia to block pain in a certain part of the body. The expecting mother did spare her followers of one gory detail — the final stages of labor — but she did give her followers enough knowledge that the birth hurt "like hell.”

Twelve hours later, after suffering contractions and an epidural, Thomas gave birth to Fearne Eileen at 1:04 a.m. on May 17, weighing 7 lbs. 4 oz. It only took Thomas 20 minutes after her birth to show a picture of her breastfeeding her newborn.

Thomas isn’t the only mom to have taken to social media to document her birth. Last year, mother Ruth Fowler Iorio went into labor with her son and documented the whole process in a series of posts on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook. Iorio cursed, bathed, and eventually gave birth all in front of her social media friends, something Thomas spared her followers. While her photos captured the beauty and pain of childbirth, social media sites flagged them, and her account was temporarily taken down because they resembled “pornography.”

Perhaps in the digital age social media has become a new form of therapy for expecting mothers during labor, putting into question if these women are oversharing or if society is too sensitive to the miracle of life.