Until We Have Better Science, Please Shut Up About My Pregnancy Pinot Grigio

When I decided to have my first child, my friends who were already parents warned me that I’d soon have someone constantly making demands of me, someone who didn’t care about my autonomy, dignity, or privacy. Sadly, they didn’t mean the baby. As soon as I began showing, my health was no longer solely my business. Strangers looked askance at my Starbucks cup (no matter that it was filled with decaf) and my plate of sushi (never mind that I had the OK from my OB, the chief of maternal-fetal medicine at Massachusetts General Hospital). When they weren’t criticizing me for gaining too much weight, they were carping that I hadn’t gained enough. I met a brand-new acquaintance for dinner at an upscale Cambridge, Mass., restaurant. Halfway through the meal, he looked at me and said, “So, have you started lactating?”

Why do we treat women’s bodies as public property when they’re pregnant? The question has been debated (and debated and debated) in the context of abortion; the ACLU and the state of Vermont are currently parsing its subtler legal implications. But when it comes to issues of etiquette, few people even bother to think about why it’s so common for strangers to pile on pregnant women and ask alarmingly personal questions, lecturing about health-related matters of opinion and treating the women not as the bearers of children but as children themselves.

As The New York Times once put it, pregnant women are “slow-moving targets for strangers who judge.” Is it garden-variety boorishness that drives this? Surely it can’t be; that would mean far too many people who are thoughtful in other circumstances are boors in this one. Most of us know better than to comment on a nonpregnant woman’s weight gain, at least to her face. But we also greet pregnant women with cries of “You’re huge!” We have a sense of respect and common decency. It’s just that the urge to examine every last aspect of an expectant mother’s health runs roughshod all over it.

Maybe these are the good intentions with which the road to hell is paved. We all have an interest in the continuation of the species and an instinct to protect the vulnerable; we all have a stake in whether a baby is born healthy. And having a stake, of course, means needing to control—wanting, directly or indirectly, to have a say in how pregnant women treat their fetuses and thus themselves.

There’s a rub here, though: except for some obvious principles (don’t drink very much, don’t smoke), we don’t really know how to control the health of a child in utero. The science just isn’t there—which means people have to fall back on their personal opinions about how pregnant women should behave. In other words, they can’t help but judge.

Take that Starbucks cup, for instance. Pretend it’s filled with real, caffeinated coffee. Now look at the research on whether a pregnant woman should be drinking it. You’ll find plenty of scary studies; some are even about humans instead of lab rats. But they’re almost entirely about heavy caffeine consumption, five cups a day or more; there are almost no good data to suggest that a cup a day will hurt. This is not the kind of science that should make a stranger leap to a fetus’s defense just because its mother has a latte cup in her hand. But if you have a strong belief that any level of caffeine is bad for a fetus, and you know that the science is inconclusive, your belief is going to outweigh that science every time. And with strong beliefs comes the tendency to foist them on others.

Similarly, no one knows what the exact effect of a (singular, one) glass of wine is on a fetus, especially after the first trimester. But every doctor I’ve ever talked to has said it’s almost certainly negligible. This does not keep people from giving pregnant women the evil eye at dinner if there’s a nice pinot on the table.

I’m hopeful that better science might someday solve this—that, once the risks of various maternal behaviors are made clearer, we’ll all stop judging each other because we’ll be looking at the same data. This long-needed study is a good start.

In the meantime, though, I’d like to encourage the pregnant women of America to try a little experiment. The next time someone admonishes you for eating Brie or sipping a cappuccino, turn the judgment and invasion of privacy back on the other person. Tell him fatty cheese and coffee aren't good for anyone, and you really don't think he should eat or drink them either. If someone says you've gained a lot of weight, respond, "At least I have an excuse." And if, say, a near-stranger asks you if you’re lactating yet, answer the question, then smile earnestly and ask him about his breast fetish. I promise you, he won't bother you again.