Giving birth can be scary prospect, especially for first-time mamas.
You’ve gone to the effort of getting pregnant, growing the sprog and carrying it around for nine months but movies, TV and every other woman you’ve ever spoken to will have you very worried that labour will be the hardest (and scariest) part of having a baby.
It’s hard to know what to expect or even how the whole things works and that’s where Liz Chalmers comes in.
The New Zealander owns the Puget Sound Birth Center in Seattle in the US.
She recently created a video to teach her niece Charlotte, who is learning to be a childbirth educator, about giving birth and has unwittingly gone viral.
Using just a ping pong ball and a balloon, she demonstrates exactly what happens to the womb and the birth canal during labour.
She lodges the ball at the bottom of the inflated balloon and squeezes the balloon, mimicking how contractions work, before eventually the “cervix” (the opening of the balloon) dilates enough and with one final squeeze the “baby” (the ping pong ball) pops out.
It sounds weird but is actually bang on and pretty helpful for anyone wondering or worrying about giving birth.
Check it out for yourself here.
Since being posted on Facebook the short clip has been viewed millions of times.
Liz was surprised to find that anyone other than her niece was interested in it.
“This little video has gone much further than I ever expected!” she wrote.
