It’s civil war in the preggosphere

Illustration by David Foldvari

There are people who will tell you that pregnancy is a magical experience. These people are bores and liars, and they should not be trusted. 

In reality, pregnancy is a tedious period in which you must deny yourself many of the things that make life pleasurable. These range from the obvious – alcohol, cigarettes – to the lesser known but nonetheless painful. Off the menu for up to 40 weeks of your life: cold brew, sushi, Botox, skipping breakfast, sleeping on your stomach, sleeping on your back, oysters, melatonin, jeans without elasticated waistbands, hot baths, ab crunches, retinol, the missionary position. 

Nobody wants to hang out with you any more, and it’s hard to blame them because socialising must always take the form of “some sort of walk” or “some sort of lunch”. But all of these annoyances pale in comparison to the heaviest burden you must now carry, aside from the melon in your gut: pregnancy makes using the internet nigh on impossible. 

This reality is hitting me hard, because I am quite pregnant and there’s also few things in life I enjoy more than playing on my phone. When you are quite pregnant the experience of playing on your phone shifts somewhat, taking the form of constantly googling monotonous and innocuous questions that end with the words “safe?” or “normal?” Google rarely has the answer to these questions. 

Partially this is because searching the internet while pregnant requires the extra step of navigating your way through a page of search responses that are bursting at the seams with post-menopausal women. None of these women has the answer to whatever you’re asking, but they’re in the forums and on the websites on which you would imagine the answers can be found. They are in there screaming at each other about pregnancy terms that they find tantamount to femicide, like “pregnant people”. None of these women have birthed a child in decades. They think safe sleep is woke and autism diagnoses are fake. They demand to be heard, and yet they – somehow, unbelievably – have no genuine parenting wisdom they are willing to share with you. 

This is not to say that my peers are any more helpful. I’ve come to understand that the world of pregnancy is experiencing a kind of online civil war. In one camp are the rightwing trad wives and hopeful girlfriends, the women who apparently grew up wanting to be barefoot in their own kitchens for ever. These mothers believe that pregnancy is beautiful, that your body just simply knows how to do this. That this is your purpose in the world, and that, if you are appropriately feminine, you will be constantly and beatifically happy while fulfilling this societal function. 

On the other side of the civil war are mums who are actually not that different to their enemies – such is often the case with civil wars – apart from the fact that they believe motherhood is the world’s most arduous and life-ruining job, and that they should be awarded OBEs for their service to the next generation of Montessori children. These mums are big users of TikTok, where they bravely share newborn nighttime routines that see them rise tearfully 8-12 times a night, exhausted and resilient. You do wonder whether this process would be less tiring if they simply eliminated the step of setting up their ring light first.

On Reddit everyone is convinced they are going to die. On Mumsnet everyone appears to be experiencing some sort of group psychotic episode where they only speak in acronyms and hate their evil husbands. Taken as a whole this is a situation that feels like it’s conspiring not just to be deliberately unhelpful, but to make you feel more alone in the process. 

In this sense, arguably it is useful and instructive. It seems as though the pregnancy internet (or preggosphere) is meant to prepare you for the mum internet (or momosphere), which is just as, if not more, brutal. Much has been written about the strange viciousness of the latter. Last year Amanda Hess, a culture writer for the New York Times, published her book Second Life: Having a Child In the Digital Age. It chronicles the depth of the weirdness of the motherhood web, which Hess encountered after a routine ultrasound detected a mysterious abnormality. Unsurprisingly she turned to the internet for answers; and, more unsurprisingly still, she found none. 

Instead she was confronted with a technological portal to the underside of the foot of parenting, from freebirthing to eugenics. “Once I became pregnant, my relationship with technology became so much more intense,” Hess told NPR. “It was only later that I really began to understand that these technologies work as narrative devices.” 

In One Bad Mother, a book released earlier this year by culture writer EJ Dickson, the narrative devices those technologies employ start bad and don’t improve. Instead, the world of the pregnancy internet naturally gives birth to an online world filled with momfluencers, stage moms, antivaxxers and working mothers. Her examples, viewed through the lens of pop culture, may appear disparate but they have one thing in common: they have strayed from the strict parameters of “good motherhood” and in the process have become villains, often even before their children enter the world (Dickson, like Hess and many other mothers, began worrying, searching and documenting before actually giving birth). 

Once you navigate your way through the maze of the pregnancy internet, this tendency to blame is everywhere. After navigating the panic attacks of Reddit – where everyone is American and somehow has personalised access to their own on-call obstetrician – and the DHs, FTMs, VBACs and SAHMs of Mumsnet, the angry grannies of Facebook forums and the TikTok influencers from both sides of the preggosphere civil war, this is always where you land. Whether you’ve eaten the wrong soft cheese or rolled over during sleep, whether you’re a high-risk pregnancy or you’re dying for a glass of wine, the answer is always the same: somehow, the situation you’re in is your fault. You are being a bad mother, and you’re not even a mother yet.

It’s enough to make you log off altogether until your kid is 18. Well, almost enough. Personally, I will still be scratching the itch of playing on my phone. I only have myself to blame.