Woman asks if she's wrong to unfriend woman for posting 'uncomfortable' photos of baby.
Trigger warning. This story could be potentially upsetting. When this woman is uncomfortable looking at her friend's pictures of her late baby, she asks Reddit:
'AITA for unfriending someone for posting photos of their stillborn?'
I need to start this by saying I FEEL like the asshole in this situation.
There is a woman I know, and am friends with on Facebook. We aren't close friends ourselves, but she is a family friend, and is very sweet. Several years ago, she unfortunately had a stillborn baby, which of course hit her very hard.
Multiple times a year, she uploads memorial posts to Facebook, alongside photos of the baby. Because of the fact that the baby was born having already died in utero, this means she posts images of a babies corpse.
It's normally close up photos of the face, which is totally purple, and very blatantly dead and asphyxiated. It's really quite distressing seeing an infants body in that state.
I understand that this is her way of mourning, and I tried my very best to be sensitive about the situation, but I just cannot deal with seeing something so gruesome just randomly popping up on my feed without warning.
It turns my stomach every time and leaves me with that horrible feeling, because it really is a very graphic image. I knew it would probably be distressing for her if I said anything to her since she is grieving, so figured that if I just unfriended her she wouldn't notice.
Well, she did notice. And asked my mother about why I'd unfriended her, and my mother told her it was because the pictures 'grossed [me] out'. She burst into tears, and will no longer talk to me.
My mum is saying it was rude of me to unfriend her, and I should have just dealt with it privately. I feel horrible for making her feel like she did something wrong, and I can't imagine the pain of losing a child, but I couldn't bear to keep seeing pictures like that. AITA?
Let's see what Reddit had to say.
pixiegirl88 writes:
NTA. Honestly what she's doing could trigger anyone she knows because of that. And also i wouldn't want to see it.
There is always the unfollow option so you just don't see the person's posts on your feed. But unless you're super close to them, unfriending someone isn't crazy unreasonable for that.
ruinedbymovies disagrees:
YTA. Some people who have a stillbirth get the same kind of new baby photos you would get for a live birth. Post mortem photography has existed almost since photography existed, and can be a tool for managing grief.
These are peoples’ children and they don’t find the photos “gross”. It’s fine for the OP not to want to see them, but it’s also fine for the family friend to treasure them.