Alexandra Starr

In New York, pregnancy is a form of tyranny

Alexandra Starr discovers that in Manhattan expecting a baby is all about you and your performance, rather than the child: doctors and websites give the mother-to-be no quarter

Even Sylvia Plath (though usually pretty downbeat about life) viewed pregnancy as an exalted state. In her diary she characterised gestation as ‘the Great Experience a [woman’s] body is formed to partake of, to nourish’, while in her poem ‘Morning Song’ she celebrated feeling ‘cow heavy and floral’. Bringing children into the world clearly fulfilled a profound need for Plath. But I suspect that even she would have felt differently about the joys of maternity had she experienced it not in London in the early 1960s, but in Manhattan circa 2009.

Trust me, I know what I’m talking about. My husband and I spent most of last year in London, all the while ignoring our parents’ insinuations that we should attempt to produce British-born children. There were benefits to remaining a two-person household. We had evenings at the theatre followed by long dinners and trips to places as far flung as India and Egypt. Now that I’m stateside, a few months removed from first-time motherhood, however, I wonder if succumbing to familial pressure might not have been such a bad idea. It would have allowed me to escape the tyranny of a New York pregnancy.

In a city obsessed with self-improvement and status, becoming big with child is not a mellow experience. New Yorkers may appear to be concerned about your baby, but in fact it’s all about you, not your child. How you eat during pregnancy is seen as a reflection of your character and social standing.

Pregnancy in Manhattan combines crunchy-granola wholesomeness — go organic, absolutely no drinking (to say nothing of lighting up a cigarette), cut out the caffeine — with an urban prejudice against growing anything bigger than the ‘Perfect Bump’ (as the title of a New York magazine article describing the city’s epidemic of skinny pregnancies put it).

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