Not appearing on BBC2's Despatch Box due to pregnancy-related exhaustion is, in this ruthless media world, about as acceptable as missing a deadline due to, say, depression over stretch marks. These are "women's things", and although the producer said she understood, I could tell she was mentally ticking me off her list of regulars because I am suddenly "unreliable".

Commissioning editors have lately taken to asking anxiously, "Can you really write when you're pregnant?", as if my brain has been permanently disengaged. Worse still, my agent has been diverting my calls to his secretary since month six, when my waistline disappeared.

Attending the Labour Party conference with a bump was a particularly depressing experience. Gone was the jovial networking and flirtatious, four-day job-hunt of yesteryear. Just getting between the conference centre and the main receptions required the stamina of a decathlete. On the climb to the linking bridge, fellow journalists would jog past, laughing: "Go on Lauren, you can do it!"

Stumbling out into the midnight rain after the Indie's party, I found myself suddenly in pain. By this point, I had been "working" 15 hours straight, reporting for a radio station at 7am and 4pm, and then information-gathering for the next day.

Three young men in Millbank-issue suits were ahead of me in the queue for a taxi. As a cab swooped into view, I weakly asked if I could go ahead of them. The tallest spun around, looked me up and down, and asked: "Why?" I replied that I was eight months pregnant and in some pain, or "I really wouldn't ask".

The cab pulled over and he pushed me aside with a sneery: "Oh, come off it. So what?" And I was left on the pavement, crying with humiliation.

The problem is that no one really knows how to treat a working, pregnant woman any more. The gently paternalistic and patronising approach is preferred by the likes of Ian Hislop. As Ian and I walked on to the set of Have I Got News for You together, he quipped: "Very clever, waiting until you're heavily pregnant to appear, you know. We'll have to be kinder to you now."

Then there's the "I'm going to be vile to you 'cos I don't care" approach favoured by the likes of Derek Draper. We appeared together on the BBC Choice show Newsfight: Good Evening Rockall. On this show, guests pitch press stories to the audience, who then vote for the most relevant and interesting to appear in a final news bulletin.

In the first round, Derek pitched an article on paternity leave. He turned to the audience and, with a caring expression, explained that this government policy was very important and would encourage deeper bonding between fathers and children. It would "help mothers everywhere", he simpered.

My story was about the introduction of gold cards for wealthy supermarket shoppers. I argued strongly that this was further proof of a two-tier society and an example of the poor subsidising the wealthy. With no sense of irony at all, Draper yelled: "Well that may be interesting to mums who need to buy nappies, Lauren, but not to the rest of us."

When the audience disagreed and voted for my news story, he shrieked in a very un-PC fashion: "It's not fair! They're only voting for you 'cos yer pregernant!"

Pregnancy may not be good on the CV, but it's an excellent jerk deterrent.