You could be forgiven for thinking that Kourtney Kardashian had revolutionised childbirth, given the reaction to her "pulling a baby out of her vagina" on the US TV show Keeping Up with the Kardashians. Sensational as the headlines are, the reality is almost dull: Kardashian simply pushed baby Penelope out, then reached down to guide her the rest of the way.

Twitter users have branded the birth "gross", "shocking" and "brave", while others have lauded it as a win for "normal" birth in a country where the caesarean rate is 34% and rising.

In my work as a doula, supporting women through birth, I hear the phrase "I would like to catch my own baby" again and again; it's a practice as common as our increasingly medicalised maternity system will allow.

As Sue MacDonald of the Royal College of Midwives explains: "It is normal, and receiving your own baby can be wonderful. Touch is so fundamental to the mother-baby relationship and helps with bonding and breastfeeding. It is far more shocking when the baby is immediately taken away from the mother."

More worrying than a woman being the first person to touch her own baby is how helpless society expects women to be during childbirth, and how a woman's body and baby is apparently off limits to her own touch. In the footage of Penelope's birth, Kardashian is far more passive than active: recumbent, seemingly anaesthetised, restricted in movement. Yet she dares to reach down and take her baby, from her own body, and the world recoils in horror.

It feels timely, then, that tens of thousands of women across the globe will screen a new documentary on Thursday called Freedom For Birth, calling for womens' rights in childbirth to be upheld. It is being hailed as a "mothers' revolution": perhaps, when her hands are a little less full, Kardashian will join the uprising.