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A mother who took on Instagram after they removed photos of childbirth from her page is celebrating after the social media giant backed down.

Nurse and campaigner Katie Vigos, 32, whose childbirth Instagram account Empowered Birth Project went viral, launched a petition in December 2017 calling for social media policy changes.

Here, she tells Sky News about her journey after Instagram announced this week that it would no longer block graphic images of childbirth or nudity in the context of childbirth.

For many people, the photos I post on my Instagram account are the first time they are seeing childbirth up close and in detail.

Even many women that have given birth do not actually know what it looks like.

I'm a registered nurse in California. I'm not a labour and delivery nurse but I've attended births during nursing school and as a doula - and it's a great passion of mine.

As a mother, I've had three childbirth experiences myself and I decided that for my third child, I wanted to share and document that journey.

But things didn't go to plan and I had to have an emergency caesarean section.

I shared my traumatic experience and photos of my surgery and recovery on my Instagram account and the reaction was amazing.

I saw that so many other people were inspired to tell their stories and that is how my page evolved - I now have 301,000 followers.

As a mother, I had experienced what other people had gone through and it was a modern way of supporting each other and showing people how life really is.

I felt really encouraged to know that I was on to something, it was something people wanted to learn about and I think we should have the freedom to share our experiences without censorship.

Over the years, I grew tired of and increasingly frustrated with posts of women giving birth being removed from the social network and categorised as "offensive".

So in December 2017 I started a petition for a change in policy to allow uncensored childbirth and I got a lot of support from my online community.

Supporters were primarily women, but I did notice and appreciate the men's voices adding to what we were fighting for.

And this week, Instagram and Facebook announced it would no longer ban graphic images of people giving birth.

I was surprised that it happened so quickly - it took just a bit over a month before Instagram got in touch with me after I launched the petition, although we didn't announce the decision publicly until last Friday.

Facebook and Instagram are still working on their recognition technology, to fine-tune it, so it can automatically blur out the more graphic photos.

I've actually only been dealing with women at Facebook and Instagram and they have been really, really supportive.

I think it's really encouraging, the amount of advocacy that's happening by some really incredible women.

Their decision on childbirth photos absolutely changes the way we see birth and will continue to see it in the future.

It's still a sensitive topic for a lot of people but this is about confronting your own human experiences and how you feel about the human body.

I agree that it is up to people to decide whether or not they want to see these images, but I feel the time is right for us as a society to move on and most people are ready for this.

We're so accustomed to seeing the female body in a sexual context that uncensored childbirth will probably continue to make people feel uncomfortable for a while, but it's these changes that will make a difference in how one of the most natural and extraordinary events in a person's life are perceived in the future.

An Instagram spokesperson told Sky News: "Over the past several months we have worked with birthing advocates and women's health experts to help craft this policy update that we believe better categorises birthing imagery as educational and celebratory.

"Instagram is a reflection of our diverse global community and our policies can sometimes be more blunt than we would like, which results in restricting content that is shared for legitimate purposes. But, we are always working to create better policies for our global community and we believe this update is a great example of that."