Facebook bans mother for posting photos of baby born with severe birth defect

Madeleine Morgenstern

Facebook banned Tennessee mother Heather Walker after she posted photos of her son born with a severe birth defect. (Image source: The Daily Mail

A Tennessee mother is furious after Facebook banned photos of her son born with a severe birth defect.

Grayson James Walker lived just eight hours after he was born on Feb. 15. He had anencephaly, a fatal condition in which a baby is born without parts of the brain and skull.

Heather Walker recently posted photos of Grayson without his hat on, igniting an apparent firestorm by doing so.

“Not long after, Facebook deleted them because of the content,” she told WMC-TV.  “They allow people to post almost nude pictures of themselves, profanity, and so many other things but I‘m not allowed to share a picture of God’s beautiful creation.”

To protest Facebook’s actions, Walker and her friends re-posted the photos — earning Walker a 24-hour ban from the site.

Among Facebook’s “community standards” are bans on content that is violent, threatening or depicts self-harm, but Walker said there’s nothing that prohibit the photos she posted.

Walker learned of her baby’s fatal birth defect 16 weeks into her pregnancy. Though doctors said she could choose to abort, she decided to carry her son to term, turning to her faith to help with the months ahead.

“My husband and I, we started prayer and we knew that God knew since the beginning of time that he had us for this,” she told WMC in February.

The day she delivered, a professional photographer from the non-profit organization Now I Lay Me Down To Sleep was on hand to capture the family’s short time with their third child.

“If you’re my friend and you want to see the picture then look at it, but if you don’t, just like any TV show or anything else you watch, if you don‘t want to see it you don’t have to,” she told the station.  “But I want to share this with people just like any other person wants to share their baby or their child.”

Madeleine Morgenstern, The Blaze, May 19, 2012

See a slideshow of the photos Facebook banned here.