20 TV Shows And Movies That Nailed Realistic Depictions Of Pregnancy
There's a lot of things TV and movies get wrong when it comes to pregnancy. For one, you generally have a minute to breathe before rushing off to the hospital.
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And when babies are born? They are the size of newborns, not perfectly rounded-out 6-month-olds.
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There are some things that the media gets right about the moment, like with these TV and movie pregnancies.
1.It all started with TV's first-ever pregnant woman, Lucy Ricardo, played by the iconic Lucille Ball. Before her, the pregnancy experience hadn't even been shared with TV audiences.
2.Jenna Fischer found out she was pregnant on the day that they started filming Pam's pregnancy on The Office.
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Pam's pregnancy was pretty real in the show's context too. It wasn't a planned pregnancy, and there are definitely a few ~weird~ feelings about it. Shoutout to all the moms that aren't glowy and perfect throughout all of pregnancy — through Pam, they are seen.
3.Jennifer Garner did the same while pregnant with oldest child Violet toward the end of Alias.
4.The birth scene in Apocalypto is so realistic that many people thought the film included footage of an actual birth.
5.Rebecca giving birth to the triplets in This Is Us touches on a big fear that parents of multiples grapple with.
6.Miranda being conflicted about getting pregnant and not falling into the glowing, happy pregnant woman role on Sex and the City was a low-key joy.
7.Annie Camden finding out she was pregnant with the twins on 7th Heaven was a pretty rare look at an older woman experiencing an unexpected pregnancy.
8.Anne has a relatable reaction when she finds out she's pregnant again eight months after giving birth on Workin' Moms.
9.The Letdown also explores a mom choosing abortion, but this time there were medical factors involved.
10.We see a lot of different, realistic pregnancies in What to Expect When You're Expecting.
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Pregnancy and motherhood don't look the same for everyone, even when you're experiencing it at the same time. This also gets an extra salute for being a film that gets real about how birth goes down.
11.Kristy's traumatic birth in She's Having a Baby was a rare reminder that pregnancy is pretty dangerous.
12.Molly Ringwald gives an incredible, raw performance as Darcy, a teen experiencing pregnancy and postpartum, in For Keeps.
13.The Back-Up Plan may be a little cheesy, but the scene where Zoe gives birth brings things back to reality.
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It shows both the funny and serious sides to labor.
14.Baby Mama reminds us there's no shame around what you say when you're in labor.
15.Look Who's Talking also kept it real about how there's no shame in choosing to get help with the pain.
16.Nine Months shows two realistic approaches to labor: Rebecca's and Gail's.
17.Knocked Up didn't lie about how long labor takes most people. Allison (Katherine Heigl) is one of the rare pregnant women in film that knows she has time to make calls, to take a bath and try to find her zen, and to get to the hospital without panicking.
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It's also awesome to see another pregnant woman yell at an eager video documentarian, not gonna lie.
18.Jane the Virgin may have not been realistic about conception, but it did capture the struggles of new moms whose babies struggle to latch.
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Getting baby to latch is just part of the battle, of course. Jane is pretty real as she navigates breastfeeding, springing a leak, and worrying about her milk supply.
19.Everything Ali Wong has said in her parenting-centric stand-ups has been real AF when it comes to pregnancy and delivery.
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Ali makes light of some of the horrors of pregnancy and motherhood with her super-relatable rants. It's hard to pick the greatest moment from her two specials, but I think she hit peak reliability when she celebrated her postpartum "Asian pear underwear."