When Cady Hoffman went into labor on the evening of Oct. 7, she did it live.
On a typical day, Ms. Hoffman, 32, livestreams on Twitch from a gaming chair in her Austin, Texas, home as she pilots an avatar through the online role-playing game “World of Warcraft.” This time, she appeared wincing on the living room floor in a flowing crimson gown. Over the next eight hours, she could be seen whimpering into a couch cushion, squatting and grunting in a corner, clutching the lip of a birthing pool and involuntarily screaming. Friends and birth attendants cared for Ms. Hoffman as a live audience chat rolled across a big-screen television mounted above their heads. At 2:45 a.m. on Oct. 8, a baby girl named Luna joined the stream.
In an interview three days later, Ms. Hoffman compared her approach to labor to a gamer’s flow state. “I just had to lock in,” she said. “I had to forget that there were any cameras there, and really surrender myself to the experience.”
Ms. Hoffman — Fandy on Twitch — usually streams to a crowd of a few thousand people. The stream of her labor and childbirth reached a peak of 29,489 simultaneous viewers. Among them was Ms. Hoffman’s 15-year-old daughter, who watched the livestream from her bedroom upstairs, and Dan Clancy, the chief executive of Twitch, who dropped into the stream’s live chat to write: “Fandy, best of luck and congratulations. Wishing you the best in this journey.”
A Twitch video preserving the stream has since clocked more than 769,000 views; news of its existence broke containment, reaching TMZ and E! Online. A Twitch spokeswoman said it was the first childbirth streamed on the platform.
It was not, however, the first broadcast birth. In 2001, “Good Morning America” showed five live births in American hospitals during one February morning’s show, which it called “Super Baby Tuesday” and which Charlie Gibson compared to watching a golf tournament. In 2020, Emma Isaacs, the chief executive of the Australian membership community Business Chicks, streamed her birth to a few thousand followers on Instagram. And of course, many births have been documented in film and video, in midcentury instructional hospital tapes, in the 1982 Nova documentary “The Miracle of Life,” and on YouTube, where a whole genre of edited birth videos has bloomed.
What distinguished Ms. Hoffman’s act was its social context. A news show frames its content for a general audience. A birth streamed on Instagram arrives on a platform already dedicated to documenting (and monetizing, and arguing over) women’s private lives. Twitch is a platform dedicated to streaming video games. It is dominated by young men, and its discourse is largely shaped by their desires and sensibilities.
“The vast majority of our viewer base is men,” said Ms. Hoffman’s husband, Bryan Loyd, who appeared nervously pacing or bouncing on the birthing ball for much of the stream. (They met through World of Warcraft in 2019, where he plays under the name Adamax; he visited her in Texas in early 2020 and never left.) “I think it was extremely educational to a good majority of them,” he added.
When Ms. Hoffman streamed her birth, she disrupted Twitch’s usual offerings, upstaging the blithe spectacle of video game carnage with the excruciating drama of birth. Her chat became a comic space in which gaming terms were adapted to Ms. Hoffman’s reproductive work. Onlookers called it a “character creation stream,” asked for the newborn’s specs and voiced approval of Ms. Hoffman’s in-game feats: “w contraction,” “w push,” “w baby.”
In the movies, childbirth can seem to take mere seconds. Even a 20-minute YouTube video is a highlight reel. A livestream allowed Ms. Hoffman to show the full picture. As her labor progressed, the stream essentially transformed into a live educational webinar on the birthing process. In the chat, users asked questions like, “Guys is she clip farming or does it really take this long?” (On average, it takes longer.) If she stood up, would the baby fall out? (Sadly, no.) What would happen if she pooped? (She did, and a birthing attendant discreetly fished it out of the pool with a net — a thrilling moment in the chat.)
Other streamers joined the event. Tim Esfandiari, a Twitch streamer with 1.4 million followers, delivered play-by-play birth commentary to his own audience, using a green screen to insert himself into the birthing room, where he blew a mystical horn and offered a plunger. Members of the e-sports team FaZe watched her stream on their stream, screaming when she screamed. When the baby arrived, the 21-year-old FaZe member Jason Nguyen gifted Ms. Hoffman 200 free subscriptions, at a value of $998.
Discussing the experience later, while her newborn dozed nearby, Ms. Hoffman said she had been too occupied with childbirth to check on the discourse in the chat. It was the next day, after Ms. Hoffman began to recover from the birth and was able to peruse her phone, that she realized that not every online observer had approved of her decision.
On Twitter and Instagram, strangers dropped in to tell Ms. Hoffman that she was “vile” or “disgusting” and should be “ashamed.” They accused the birth of running afoul of Twitch’s terms of service, and questioned whether her choice to birth at home was safe. They criticized her for exposing her newborn child to the world of content without her consent and expressed disapproval that she had an OnlyFans account, where she photographed her body in other contexts. Kotaku, a gaming blog, said she had broken “unsettling new ground.” On Twitch, the streamer and commentator Charles White Jr. (5.7 million Twitch followers) said Ms. Hoffman’s stream had perverted a “private” and “sacred” moment of childbirth into a “monetizable spectacle.”
“There’s really no other reason to be livestreaming the delivery of your child other than the obvious attention it’s going to bring with it,” he said. “She actually went out and was breastfeeding the entirety of the Twitch ecosystem.” Mr. White delivered his commentary after a promotional speech for his branded soap company, while sitting in front of a display of his branded energy drink product, monetizing the event for himself.
“It’s just very apparent that a lot of the people that are critiquing did not actually watch any of the stream,” Mr. Loyd said. Ms. Hoffman believes that many of her critics misjudged her motivations and imagined that the stream was more explicit than it really was. She had cleared the livestream with representatives from Twitch beforehand, she said, to ensure it complied with its rules.
Ms. Hoffman planned the home birth in consultation with her doctors, who had judged her pregnancy low-risk, and hired a midwife and nurse to attend the birth. She was clothed throughout her labor. Occasionally, her family, friends or attendants would shift the angle or place a hand in front of the lens. As her labor intensified, she slipped into a birthing tub, which obscured most of her body from view.
As for the charge that livestreamed childbirth was a monetization play, Mr. Loyd said it was not set up to push subscriptions or advertisements, like some marathon streams they had staged before. The stream, he said, brought in roughly $6,000, about half of the cost of hiring the birth attendants. He believed it was implausible that his daughter would be bullied over the footage. “I don’t know why kids would make fun of someone for being born,” he said.
“I’ve been in the public space for so long, I’ve heard a lot of criticism,” Ms. Hoffman said. “I could see how some people may not approve from the outside, not knowing anything about us. But a lot of it, honestly, was pretty easy to brush off.”
When Luna arrived, Ms. Hoffman deactivated her OnlyFans account, a decision she and Mr. Loyd had made before the birth to allow her to focus more time on caring for their child — not to appease her critics. “Neither of us have any shame about how we made a living, and how we made our money, whatsoever,” Mr. Loyd said. “We’ve reached a point financially where we just don’t need the money.”
This was not Ms. Hoffman’s first labor. She had given birth to her first daughter when she was 17 years old, a few weeks out from her high school graduation, inside a hospital. She described the experience as disempowering. “I kind of just did what the doctor told me to do back then, and that’s how that went,” she said. “I wanted something different for Luna.”
This time, Ms. Hoffman gave birth in her home, in her clothes, in the positions she preferred, in an environment she controlled, alongside friends and attendants she chose. She filmed it under angles that she supervised, then streamed it on her channel, to her community, without shame — and compelled her audience to put down their consoles and pay attention.
Amanda Hess is a writer at large for The Times.
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