Why Are We So Obsessed with Meghan Markle's "Baby Bump"?

From Harper's BAZAAR

There is absolutely no upside to speculating on whether celebrities like Meghan Markle are pregnant.

And on some level most people know this, because most people would not do this to anyone they actually knew.

Or, for that matter, someone they didn’t know. If you went up to someone in the grocery store and exclaimed, “you look pregnant!” and they weren’t, they’d just feel like you were telling them they looked puffy. They’d be insulted. People in the store would, rightly, stare at you like you were a maniac. It would be, at the very least, embarrassing for everyone involved.

Double this reaction for people you actually know. Then they’d probably shout, “I do not look pregnant, and Bob and I don’t want kids, mom!”

Or, worse, they might say, “Bob and I are desperately trying to have kids and it’s not happening” and then burst into tears.

This is why most people are sensible enough to wait for their friends and family members to reveal their pregnancy in their own time. Somehow, that level of good sense goes out the window when Meghan Markle wears a ruffled blue dress and tabloids immediately begin wondering, “Is the Duchess of Sussex hiding a baby bump?” One Irish medium is even predicting twins. And then there was the rest of the Internet:

Maybe she is, maybe she isn’t, but it’s really on her to announce it. It would be nice to respect women’s right to do that in their own time. Because there are a lot of reasons not to want the world to immediately know that you’re pregnant.

One pretty obvious reason is that it’s estimated that 10 to 20 percent of pregnancies end in miscarriage. Since the subject of miscarrying is still taboo among many people, it might make sense that you wouldn’t want to share that news with absolutely everyone in the world. That’s why many people recommend that you wait until around 12 weeks to reveal your pregnancy, when there is less risk of miscarrying.

That’s to say nothing of infertility struggles. We’re currently in the midst of a fertility crisis. One in every 10 couples struggle with infertility. Lest people think this is not a concern for celebrities, many women like Christy Teigen have spoken about their struggles with fertility. Teigen’s also spoken out about media scrutiny regarding her pregnancy, saying, “Any time somebody asks me if I’m gonna have kids, I'm just like, 'One day, you're gonna ask that to the wrong girl who is really struggling, and it's going to be really hurtful to them,' and I hate that. Stop asking me!"

Jennifer Aniston has been the subject of this type of scrutiny for nearly two decades, since she married Brad Pitt in 2000. Her exhaustion with everyone's obsession over the status of her womb promoted her to write an op-ed in 2016 which stated:"For the record, I am not pregnant. What I am is fed up. I’m fed up with the sport-like scrutiny and body shaming that occurs daily under the guise of 'journalism,' the 'First Amendment' and 'celebrity news.'"

And really, what’s the upside of these articles? If Meghan Markle ultimately turns out to be pregnant, do people think you’re a pregnancy detective? That’s not a job.

I suspect the people who enjoy this kind of speculation don’t see pregnancy as an emotional time for a woman in which they are gestating something in their bodies. They see these women as objects who are supposed to pop out a baby for our amusement.

That’s not a totally uncommon way to regard women, alas.

Women’s feelings do matter, though. So let them share those feelings when they feel safe doing so. If people like Meghan Markle are pregnant, they’ll tell you. If they do not want to tell you, well, I imagine you’ll figure it out when she’s holding a baby and saying, “this is the baby I gave birth to”.

There’s no need to zoom in closely on a picture of her wearing a dress. You get no points for spotting her condition first. So stop trying to figure out whether people look pregnant. It just makes you look like an insensitive jerk.

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