Is pregnancy meaningfully depicted in YA and if not, is that an issue?

Ask Alice is an online column written by our former Secretary, Dr Alice Boer-Endacott, who has published several young adult fantasy novels and a non-fiction mini, under ‘A B Endacott’.

I have mentioned, once or twice, that I recently gave birth to my first child. It’s been a deeply rewarding experience (well, the bit where I gave birth was fine; the subsequent parts have been a delight). However, in navigating my post-birth body and reflecting on my pregnancy, I have been struck by how little information I had to inform my expectations.

On reflection, I found this curious. I’ve been around pregnant women. I’ve heard them speak about their pregnancies. I read ‘what to expect when you’re expecting’ books (including the OG). So why did I still feel like I was the first woman to ever experience pregnancy?

I realised that across the various fiction titles I’ve read, I have almost never encountered depiction of a pregnant character where the embodied experience of pregnancy was meaningfully detailed. Obviously many books feature pregnant characters. But most of those characters are described with respect to their ever-expanding size and the ensuing cumbersome limitations, or the social implications of the character becoming a mother. I can’t think of a single book where the character’s pregnancy is explored in a way that intimately details the physicality of the changes, the constant mental load of adjusting to those changes, or of renegotiating the character’s relationship to herself and her body.

Thus we arrive at this month’s question: Is pregnancy meaningfully depicted in YA and if
not, is that an issue?

To write this column, I primarily reflected upon my personal experience with pregnancy and representations of pregnancy in fiction, which I supplemented through additional research.

As a starting point, I sought to determine whether pregnancy or pregnant characters feature at all in YA texts and I’d somehow missed it. The results of an Instagram poll revealed there are YA books that feature pregnant characters. Among them are Timber Creek Station by Ali Lewis, One Hundred Days by Alice Pung, Not So Chosen One by Kate Emery, Little Wing by Joanne Horniman, and Twilight (specifically New Moon) by Stephenie Meyer. However, in all of these books, while the pregnancy is a plot point to a greater or lesser extent, the experience of that pregnancy isn’t actually explored that much, if at all.

One text nominated which apparently runs counter to this trend is Witchcraft for Wayward Girls by Grady Hendrix. Although it’s not technically a YA book, the protagonists are teenage girls, and the depictions of pregnancy are, according to my source, accurate and detailed.

There are books which examine motherhood and the experience of caring for a child, which extend to the ways one’s identity can change (or be subsumed) by the role – one novel which springs to mind is The Push by Ashley Audrain (which inspired mixed feelings within me as a reader). However, I’m talking about pregnancy. Baby-in-belly, first trimester gas, third trimester snoring like a lumberjack, cankles, pregnancy. This dimension of pregnancy is difficult to find in the pages of fiction.

Why might this be the case?

Jessie Greengrass, whose novel Sight did explore the experience of pregnancy in depth said that “to write about pregnancy – […] its uncomfortable realities, its disorientating aftermath – felt transgressive.” One possible explanation for this is because while pregnant bodies are often treated as ‘public space,’ with the mother’s behaviour regulated through law, norm or both, this focuses on what the mother is expected to do rather than what is happening within her psychological and physical internal world.

Of course, there are books which guide the reader through the experience of pregnancy. They are helpful, from a medical perspective, in understanding week-to-week what one might broadly experience. Some even have a little bit about the emotional trajectory common to many women. But for me, they didn’t fully offer what I needed. By contrast, fiction is more intimate, something we slip into. It makes us feel the experience in a way that means we can sit with it, consider it, ruminate on it, and then absorb it. As much as Kaz Cooke’s Up The Duff offered a certain comfort through the fictional weekly diarising, it
didn’t, to me, capture the entirety of the experience because its scope is so limited. While that diarising did refer to work and other relationships, it was in passing. You can only capture so much in a handful of sentences. Fiction has the potential to explore this in a way other formats simply don’t.

Interestingly, it’s not just the minute and intimate aspects to pregnancy which seem to be missing from fiction. As this article notes, “the birth scene is now a staple of film and television, but strangely absent from fiction – sometimes alluded to in passing, but rarely dwelt on in closeup.” This article surveyed the portrayal of pregnancy and childbirth in the media. One key finding is the dearth of understanding with respect to what a ‘normal’ pregnancy and labour look like. Moreover, the authors note, “media representations are for most women the only opportunity to see a birth.” As a result, television has taken over the role of a ‘manual’ informing women about birth, but in a way which depicts birth as risky, dramatic, and painful. It’s a grim finding for several reasons. Importantly for this column, though, it emphasises that our collective consciousness of birth and pregnancy is, rightly or wrongly, informed by popular culture representations, which can include fiction.

A depiction of birth in the context of a longer story and narrative, too, might also reduce some of the body horror, or might go some way to unpicking the trauma associated with birth imparted by a combination of film and tv depictions. It’s one of the reasons hypnobirth classes exist; to deprogram women from the fear instilled by these trauma-centric depictions of birth. Another way we can achieve this outcome is through depictions of pregnancy – and birth – which get into the weeds of the experience.

We can benefit from narratives which meaningfully depict women’s experiences during pregnancy (and yes, birth) in the lived reality, across multitudes. Some have horrific morning sickness, some don’t. Some have horrific indigestion (me from week 27), some don’t. Some feel their baby kicking early, some late. Some bleed, some don’t. Some become visibly pregnant from quite early, some take until practically the third trimester to show at all.

While women experience pregnancy in myriad ways, I found I was always expecting ‘big’ things to happen, but missed the little mundane things. I wish I’d encountered versions of them in fiction to prepare me for my own mundane changes. For instance, the experience of clothes starting to tighten in a way that’s just south of comfortable, or of discovering that you have to start the day with a carb, not a piece of fruit lest it all come back up (not fun!). Equally, the feeling around 17 weeks that you can’t lie on your stomach, not because something’s in the way but because there is a wrongness to the position which tells you with every fibre of your being to not do that. None of these are, to me, ‘big’ pregnancy moments, but they threw me because I didn’t realise how many little things happened across a pregnancy.

I think it would be valuable to read a character who incidentally observes the heaviness pulling down on her pelvis, or discovers that she must put on her shoes by leaning to the side because a collection of limbs impedes that forward fold. Those two examples weren’t experiences which dominated my life, but when I noticed them, I felt a vague perturbation because I had no good frame of reference which had prepared me for them.

And this is only the physical stuff. There’s also the emotional journey; wondering in the initial weeks whether it’s worth getting emotionally invested because there’s a likelihood the pregnancy won’t continue, navigating a relationship with your body as it changes shape almost every day – even if it’s only in subtle ways, mentally preparing for a totally different routine in the not-too-distant future as you are tasked with keeping a whole human being alive.

At this point, dear reader, you might be thinking, ‘but why is this particularly necessary for YA fiction?’

Well, teenagers are proto-adults. They’re preparing for adulthood. What they consume during this time, even if it’s about experiences beyond their current stage in life, is going to be food for thought. When we have a meaningful depiction of pregnancy, that means younger male readers are set up to better understand that this is a very intense, all encompassing process and female readers are not fed some trite nonsense about pregnancy.

These are formative years, and the narratives and media people consume during them plant the seeds of ideas that can sprout years down the line.

This isn’t even something I’m advocating with the intention of saying that if such readers one day get pregnant, they will be better prepared for it. It’s, to me, more basic. It’s about adding nuance to our collective understanding of what it means to be pregnant, which in turn is liked to other issues, such as reproductive health, reproductive rights, the experience and mental health of non-birthing parents, and the ever-present discussion about the division of work and household labour across genders. I contend these are discussions and depictions which should start in adolescence, so our young people have information on how they can approach these issues and experiences as adults.

In the context of a society where I’ve found discourse around the gestalt of pregnancy to be shockingly threadbare, I’d love there to be narratives that go some way to remedying that. I wonder how my own approach to pregnancy might have been different had I had encounters with pregnant characters during my teen years. At one point, I said to my husband through tears, “I feel as though this is something happening to me.” I was constantly blindsided by the symptoms which, only after they presented, I was told “oh yes that can happen.” I felt I had to create, from scratch, a schema through which I related to my
body, and what I was experiencing.

Greengrass offers a comment that sums up what I’m trying to say “literature offers us: the chance to take the specificities of a particular experience and to use them to articulate that which is universal. I have learned almost all I know about the world, about myself, from books.” Through fiction, there’s a world which invites a much more thoughtful, less scary, understanding of what pregnancy can mean. I wish my teenage self could have read those kinds of stories.