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11 June 2014updated 24 Jun 2021 1:00pm

How should we celebrate pregnant bodies? Not with twee maternity T-shirts, for a start

In a world where women are shamed for their bodies, we should recognise how empowering, and phenomenal, a wanted pregnancy can be.

By Glosswitch

Bad news for anyone wanting to purchase an annoying, objectifying maternity T-shirt: A Pea in a Pod have pulled their Wake Me Up When I’m Skinny shirt from sale, following complaints about how offensive it is. Not to worry, though. One can still buy the classics: Baby On Board, Under Construction and (worst of all) It Started With A Kiss. The choice is yours: reduce yourself to a dehumanised vessel or offer the world a twee reminder that you – yes, you! – have had at least one shag. Oh, and there’s also Pink or Blue, Either Will Do (so you can make sure everyone knows that you are going to stereotype the hell out of your kids, not that gender matters to you AT ALL).

It’s hard to convey just how depressing I find all this stuff. You’re pregnant – you are making a real, live human being inside your own body – and all you’re supposed to be thinking is “Christ, I’m fat” or “Way-hey! I’m like a Renault 5!” I know it’s humour but it’s also a reflection of what we think of pregnancy and women. Can’t we do a little better? I think of my pregnancies as a time when I felt immensely proud of my body and its capabilities. So I’m not the first woman to have a baby – so what? It’s still amazing. If I were to design my own maternity T-shirt, it would say “GOD-LIKE CREATOR OF HUMANS” (either that or “Pro-choice – wanna make something of it?”, depending on my mood).

There are few things that I would seriously describe as empowering but a healthy, wanted pregnancy has to be one of them. Despite the enormous physical toll (plus the minor annoyance of not being able to sleep on your stomach for months on end) you can have moments when you look in the mirror and think “Ha! I am a total genius”. Who cares if you’re only doing what humans and other primates have been doing since time immemorial? It is an actual person being made in your actual body. For me it brings to mind The Onion’s spoof moon landings headline: Holy Shit Man Walks On Fucking Moon. It is that ludicrous. A separate consciousness – someone who will have their own thoughts, feelings and passions – is being formed right under where you’re digesting your dinner. And yes, perhaps strictly speaking all you’ve had to do to get there is have unprotected sex but still: you rock. It’s just a pity the rest of the world doesn’t see it that way.

It seems to me tragic – but not coincidental – that the group of people most likely to gestate other human beings have constituted an oppressed class for millennia. Like many feminists, I do wonder if that is a large part of what’s behind misogyny: not just the desire to control reproduction, but sheer, naked jealousy at what most people with wombs are able to do. Forget penis envy, it’s womb envy we really should be talking about. To be able to conjure up another person from inside you may be mundane, but it’s also mind-blowing. There is nothing that any other human can make that measures up to that, but what do we get in return? A rigid gender hierarchy which rewards those at the bottom with low pay, pension poverty, domestic exploitation, hard-line resistance to individuals making their own reproductive choices, and last (and, to be fair, probably least) totally rubbish T-shirts.

This does not seem to me a decent recompense. Why can’t we be appreciating pregnancy, and the pregnant, a little more? I’m conscious this is easier said than done. Already we tread a fine line between ignoring pregnancy altogether and idealising it with the sole purpose of viewing women as walking wombs (and, post-menopause, as mere spent forces). The media is fond of treating wanted pregnancies as morality tales, in which women who behave virtuously get to take home their little bundles of joy, but as anyone who has struggled to conceive (or to not conceive) will know, a huge part of it comes down to luck. It would be unfair to heap praise on individual women for something which they may or may not have desired, and which may or may not have been due to any exceptional effort on their part. Nonetheless, broader recognition of pregnancy as both a social good and as something really bloody miraculous still wouldn’t come amiss.

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Especially in a culture where women and girls are frequently made to feel ashamed of their bodies, shouldn’t we be trying to provide as much space as possible to appreciate their full potential? “Wake me up when I’m skinny” does the precise opposite. “Wake me up when the world fully appreciates just how utterly phenomenal I am” would be a step in the right direction.

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