Feminists “wonder about the health of the fetuses they're carrying�.

Yikes….Indeed

i'm going to start photoshopping stretch marks and swollen ankles on these poor girls. can you imagine being pregnant and in an advert shoot?!?! did they get a release from the fetus?!? it has rights, you know. ;P the woman holding the glass of N-A beer looks a bit nauseaus. she probably did the shoot to pay for the inevitable expenses for her new child. ooo...isn't that sexy?? what if the statistics for how much money it takes to raise one child from 0-18yrs old were a part of the ad??

This also plays on one of my pet peeves -- propoganda that pregnant women can't have an alcoholic drink if they want one.

Feminists “wonder about the health of the fetuses they're carrying�.

That... is kind of a superficially weird role reversal, I agree. But I guess I can see how it might be tricky to morally equate the decision not to carry a pregnancy to term (which is an assertion of one's fundamental right to self-determination) with the decision to exploit a pregnancy for money (which is assertion of personal greed). Personally I'm inclined to agree with you, that supporting the former while condemning the latter on the grounds that it might hurt the fetus is kinda hypocritical. But I've met enough self-identified (pro-choice) feminists who take seriously the interests of fetuses that I can see why people might disagree.

God, I can't read that last sentence without giggling; for some reason the prase "the interests of fetuses" makes me laugh. But I don't mean it facetiously! Promise.

Where are their stretch marks? Seriously... do celebrity bodies just not develop them?

Well it is probably presumed that the pregnancies displayed in the ads will be carried to term (or would be if they were real,) since there's no reason to presume otherwise. So what we're really talking about in this case is the health of the children these women will eventually give birth to. So worrying about the health of the fetus in this case does not, to me, seem hypocritical for someone who is pro-choice. If a fetus is aborted, a child is never born; if the fetus is made unhealthy in some way, a child may be born suffering from painful and serious ailments.

I don't know what the motivations behind these ads are, probably not good, but I was a little taken aback by your comment about the baby's health. My body looked just like that when I was very young and very pregnant. I had two healthy sons and now a healthy grandson, and the bump in my grandma-belly is not from a baby. I was even thinner with my second baby because I was running around after the first one. I love your website, but I had children very young and this felt like a bit of a put-down. Don't forget that all women aren't the same. If I were snarky I would say have your baby young and you can look good and feel good while pregnant. Weren't we ridiculing Dr. Frist for diagnosing from video? And I didn't have visible stretch-marks until after I had the baby.

My reading of the "health of the fetuses" thing was that it really is not very common to be this small everywhere but your boobs and belly when pregnant, and whether these women are naturally that way, most women are not and it certainly isn't a good example to set since it is an ideal that exists simply to make women more attractive to men and could pose a danger to the pregnancy.

Waiting until you are in your late thirties to get pregnant isn't very good for the child or the mother. Older moms are more prone to high blood pressure and onset of things like diabetes. There is an increased chance of miscarriage and birth defects in older women. It's much easier on your body to have a baby when you are young, yet we think it's a good example to set when women have a career first. This makes them more valuable to the marketplace. I don't feel comfortable judging women on what they do. It's hard to get your figure back if you gain a lot of weight during pregnancy, and it's not just men who make comments about fat women. Men don't usually criticize women for being thin, toned, young and pregnant, but our sisters are here to take up the slack. I think this "setting an example" thing is dicey when we decide that one risky pregnancy behavior is bad, but another is OK because it fits our agenda. This kind of thing is what makes healthy beautiful women think feminism is a club for people who didn't get into the lucky gene club.

My sister actually looked that hot while pregnant, but I agree that most women don't. I heppen to think that this image is photoshopped because of the smoothness of the skin the weird light angles (I'm not a photoshop expert, but I was told that's what you look for).

I totally agree with Fred Vincy on the pregnancy/alcohol thing - not that pregnant women should get drunk (esp. early in the pregnancy), but to the best of my knowledge there is no evidence that a little bit of alcohol harms the fetus.

There's nothing weird about being pro-choice and worrying about fetal health. When my sister was pregnant, I helped her get through all of the information she was given on prenatal nutrition, because I support her choice to have a baby. Given that she wants to have a baby, I'm incredibly grateful that he's healthy and perfect (and beautiful and brilliant, but I digress). Had she not wanted this baby, I would have supported her in that decision as well. That's the "choice" part of pro-choice. As long as she, the pregnant woman, makes the decision, I'm all for it.

Dangerblond, my understanding is that we as feminists by and large are in favor of putting off children until a woman has her own career not because we are concerned about market value, but because we are concerned about women's ability to avoid economic dependence on men. I agree that in a society structured around women's needs and interests, taking some years to have children in one's early or mid-twenties would be built into the assumed career path, but since it's not, we have to make the best of what we have. It's not about valuing marketplace priorities over children; it's about recognizing the constraints having children prior to being able to take care of oneself can place on women.

My first thought was that the woman selling NA beer is faked. The positioning of navel vs. breasts seems slightly off somehow. Maybe it's just me.

The other thing I thought was "oh, great, now we can go ahead and add body image issues to pregnancy...again..." Yes, there are some women who look like this when they're pregnant, but there are a lot who don't. Will advertising with super-thin, pregnant models add shame to pregnant women who do gain weight?

As for the car ad...the sexy new family station wagon? Um...weird.

Of course, it is super irritating when naked women are used for ad campaigns as ridiculous looking sex objects, and these ads are irritating in that way, regardless of whether they are real or airbrushed, healthy or not. On that we can all agree. If there is an upside to the pregnancy "craze," it is that now it is socially acceptable for pregnant women to be and feel sexy, want to have sex, have fun, etc. My mother tells me that even in the 80s pregnant women were expected to cover it all up and not to feel good about the way they looked. So I guess it is no surprise (unfortunately), that as soon as women are allowed to feel ok about their bodies when pregnant, they start to be used as marketing techniques and start to be airbrushed. Let us just hope that the pendulum doesn't swing too far in the other direction, with women being expected to feel sexy, etc., when pregnant, even if they don't, just because others do.

Of course, it is super irritating when naked women are used for ad campaigns as ridiculous looking sex objects, and these ads are irritating in that way, regardless of whether they are real or airbrushed, healthy or not. On that we can all agree. If there is an upside to the pregnancy "craze," it is that now it is socially acceptable for pregnant women to be and feel sexy, want to have sex, have fun, etc. My mother tells me that even in the 80s pregnant women were expected to cover it all up and not to feel good about the way they looked. So I guess it is no surprise (unfortunately), that as soon as women are allowed to feel ok about their bodies when pregnant, they start to be used as marketing techniques and start to be airbrushed. Let us just hope that the pendulum doesn't swing too far in the other direction, with women being expected to feel sexy, etc., when pregnant, even if they don't, just because others do.

You know, every time I hear someone talk about how much healthier babies are if women have them early, I get depressed. There shouldn't be a career track to mommyhood, where if you're not preggers by 35 you're a miserable failure who doesn't care about her babies. I don't know what my significant other will end up wanting, but this kind of crap makes me think adoption is the way to go.

Cheers,

TH

You know, every time I hear someone talk about how much healthier babies are if women have them early, I get depressed. There shouldn't be a career track to mommyhood, where if you're not preggers by 35 you're a miserable failure who doesn't care about her babies. I don't know what my significant other will end up wanting, but this kind of crap makes me think adoption is the way to go.

Cheers,

TH

Uh, apologies for the double post. Browser issue.

Cheers,

TH

Too true, Tom, and it fails to take mental and emotional health into account. For many of us, having a baby in our early 20s would have been a disaster from a health point of view.

You know, every time I hear someone talk about how much healthier babies are if women have them early, I get depressed.

True, though I just get really annoyed. I guess it doesn't matter if I'M emotionally prepared to have a child, as long as it's "easier" for me to do so before the age of 35.

EG, "jinx!"

The drinking issue also really bothers me. One of the Adrant comments was self-righteously squawking about the beer ad before he knew it was nonalcoholic. I hate that if a woman is showing, she's under public scrutiny if she chooses to have a glass of wine or a beer or whatever. I'd compare it to people who scream at others wearing fur (because let's face it - no matter how you feel about fur, the recipient of verbal abuse is ALWAYS female...I'd love to see PETA target a male hip-hop star and his entourage on a Friday night). Just being a woman puts me at risk of all kinds of harassment every day, no matter what I do or how I dress!

I hate that too--the social policing of pregnant women, which goes hand in hand with all the other unwarranted personal invasions like touching her belly, etc. My mother drank a glass of wine when she was pregnant with me, and spent the next few hours throwing up--that told her that in her case, she shouldn't do it. But plenty of babies are born to women who have the occasional drink unharmed. It is part of America's all or nothing mentality, I think.

A friend of mine--who isn't pregnant but has some serious body image issues--got harrassed by some officious busy-body at the grocery store the other week for buying--get this--a bar of chocolate. Because the tiny amount of caffeine in the chocolate, and the horrible danger it posed to the nonexistant baby justified her being a total ass to my friend. Excuse me, but has any baby ever been born with health problems due to maternal chocolate consumption? Ever? You're telling me that not only can't I have a drink, take advil, or have a cup of coffee for nine months, but I can't eat chocolate either? Is this supposed to be some kind of joke?

Pregnancy doesn't confer ownership of a woman's body on the public at large, and the whole incident really rocked my friend badly.

....I'd love to see PETA target a male hip-hop star and his entourage on a Friday night

Would pay money to see that.:)

Too true, Tom, and it fails to take mental and emotional health into account. For many of us, having a baby in our early 20s would have been a disaster from a health point of view.

It fails to take some economic factors, too. In a country with a third-world health care system, a 24-year-old woman is likely to have less money to pay for decent pre- and neonatal care than a 36-year-old one.

As a pregnant woman, whose back is killing her right now, the last thing I can imagine is posing with a beer in my hand or on the hood of a car. Ugh. Ok, I get that LOTS of famous women are pregnant right now, or have recently had children, as well as lots of normal women. I am beginning to think of this as the year of the baby, everyone I know is pregnant! However, since when is being pregnant sexy? That's what I don't like about these pictures, once again women who don't need to be displayed as sex objects, are being displayed as just that. When in my life do I just get to be a woman and not a sex object?

I don't like that these women are being criticized for the way they look in these ads. Whether they are healthy is not something anyone can judge from a photograph. These women have probably been airbrushed...but I know in my own experiance I did not start to gain weight in my legs until just a week ago.

I can agree with the woman above who talked about the chocolate bar. I went over to my friend's house with a Sprite and she pulled it out of my hand and threw it away. "You shouldn't be drinking soda! It has sugar!"...she then handed me a glass of orange juice. It was so annoying. Since when does sugar cause any health problems to a fetus? Lots of people lectured me about the caffeine thing as well, then I found out, it's complete bunk. You can safely drink 3 cups of coffee or 6 glasses of tea a day while pregnant.

I agree somewhat with dangerblond (definitely not all, since I am a feminist). You say you don't want to police women's bodies, yet you make snide comments doubting that skinny women can have healthy babies. Well *I* had a healthy baby and I was that skinny. Some people just have high metabolisms, that's all. Don't you think it's a little bigoted when people assume overweight people are unhealthy? Yes? Then why don't you believe it about skinny people? Oh right, I forgot. "Most" women aren't naturally skinny, so therefore only "most" women matter.

drumgurl, well, in fairness, I think the point was more that it is *extremely extremely* likely that these women were airbrushed. Why? Having nothing to do with stats about how women look when they're pregnant, there's the simple fact that advertisements almost universally employ airbrushing. So it's a safe assumption to make that these women are airbrushed, just like all spokesmodels.

The reason this is troubling is because, as others here have noted, it creates yet another way for women to be objectified. It's not enough to appreciate a pregnant body; you have to make it SEXY. You have to make it sizzle, by dressing in skimpy bikini tops and airbrushing. I think the point was just that it's really troubling that any woman, no matter what stage of life, is subject to objectification.

I completely agree that it's objectification, and generally bad to have a car ad with naked women in it. It has nothing to do with cars and it's an appeal to people's base motives, lust being the appeal here. I can't bring myelf to condemn men who lust after pregnant women, they are beautiful to me. The conversation that we seem to have started, though, is one about the choices women make during pregnancy. Tom Head, I want to say that there is nothing at all wrong with adoption. Many children's lives would become a fairy tale if they were adopted. You have no idea of the poverty children have to deal with.

I don't mean to diminish the concern over young women's body images. I just feel that if a pregnant woman is too thin, too fat, too old, or just right, it's her business. The only people who should offer comment of any kind are doctors, mothers, sisters, or other relatives. The time to act is before they get pregnant. If they are dieting dangerously while pregnant, it's already too late for images, examples or words to do any good. As for me and most of my friends who were young moms, we were concerned about getting puffed up from water retention, but looking like a supermodel would have been something to joke about.

We need to give young women more credit for brains and common sense. There is not exactly a national emergency of anorexic pregnant women. A pregnant woman is the last person who is going to embark on a starvation diet to become attractive to men, I don't care what Cindy Crawford is doing.

Just because I'm nitpicky... I think there's an important difference between recognizing beauty, and lusting after someone or something. For example, I recognize that my female friends are all beautiful (each in her own particular way), yet I feel no lust for any of them. I think the notion that beauty justifies lust is a masculinist one that we buy into too easily.

I'm not trying to criticize the content of what you said, at all; as I said, I'm nitpicky :)

As a pregnant woman who feels sexy as all hell, with stretch marks and all, the point - in my opinion- isn't about judging the size (or lack thereof) of the photoshopped women (I'm carrying small and did for my first kid too) but that fact that half naked women- maternity status or not shouldn't be used as mere advertising props.

I won't even get into the race issue here cuz you know that woc pregnancy is never seen as sexy - just as problematic

Just for the record, I am 23 and it would be a *terrible* idea for me to have a child anytime soon, emotionally and financially, and that's the case for the *vast* majority of other 23 year olds I know out there -- most of us have next to nothing on which to support a baby, and are not nearly stable enough yet in a lot of respects.

Also, my own mother waited until she was 30 to have her first child (me), although she married my dad when she was 23. They took the first seven years to establish themselves and really get to know each other as husband and wife before they brought a child into the picture, and I've always thought that this was an absolutely genius move on their part, and probably part of the reason their marriage has never had the kinds of troubles that my friends' parents' have had.

For women who say you were that skinny during pregnancy:

You were so skinny your thighs stood apart, even at their highest point? Being that thin, like the model in the beer ad, isn't just "skinny" -- it's one of, for instance, the main goals of the girlies over at www.livejournal.com/~proanorexia -- for all your pro-ana needs.

The model in the car ad is more realistic, and I could totally believe her as being pregnant and not heavily modified in photoshop.

Women who are skinny are very rarely so skinny that their arms lack ALL musculature, like the girl in the beer ad. Her arm is as skinny as her wrist, even where it connects to her shoulder. That's not "hey, I'm a cute size 2 who's naturally thin" skinny.

While BMIs in the higher ranges are notoriously difficult to read as health indicators because they ignore muscle mass, a BMI as low as the model's in the beer ad is something that would make a person quite possibly amenorrheic.

It's also worth noting that being this skinny during pregnancy and not experiencing a weight gain of at least 15 pounds is very closely associated with several types of birth defects and pregnancy complications -- so say all the midwifery texts I'm working through to become a licensed midwife.

And dangerblond: If you don't think there's a big problem with anorexic pregnant women, go take a look at the livejournal community mentioned above.

For the last several weeks I have been interviewing these girls and women, many of whom had anorexic mothers and are anorexic themselves. For many women, pregnancy weight gain can lead to increased feelings of pressure to stay thin, followed by intense crash diets and miscarriages or birth defects.

Even if the baby is carried to term defect-free, the results can be saddening. One mother talked to me about her three-year-old daughter's "game" in which she steps on the bathroom scale and loudly sighs or makes frustrated noises or pretend-cries.

I'm sorry, you're wrong. anorexia in pregnancy is a pressing issue, and is becoming FAR moreso in the last decade. Midwives have reported seeing many more women with eating disorders in their practices. Unless you're a birth professional, you probably wouldn't know that. anorexic moms hide their condition extremely well -- they know that society would be more harshly critical of them than an anorexic without children. But believe me, many, MANY women are out there.

Maybe they're not enough for you to consider it an epidemic -- yet. But cultural aesthetics take time to change. A few more years of models with tiny thighs and big pregnant bellies may easily make the problem worse than it is today.

"Common sense" is all well and good, but "common sense" says we shouldn't have any girls dying of anorexia in the first place. Obviously we need a little more help in this area than "common sense," like maybe getting advertisers to stop brainwashing women.

Hey, 35-year-old new mothers are not necessarily old and busted. Just for the record, I got pregnant at 35 and delivered three weeks ago, with no stretch marks in sight, and was down to my non-anorexic, non-car-modelling, pre-preg weight in a week.

But *everyone* gets the brown line. And I don't see it on the beer babe.

whoa, molly, with the proana site! lj allows unethical communities like that? over 8000 members? scary. but i'm not surprised. the mainstream media makes women believe thinness is power and society for the most part follows suit. society rewards thinness socially and economically (there are studies saying fat women are discriminated against in the workplace).

I work in advertising and what I've read in the mags says that the bellies are Photoshopped on.

I never had the brown line, but I get a new stretch mark every time I eat an oreo, pregnant or not.

This is proof of how fashionable and status conscious pregnancy has become. Interesting how advertising represents a pregnant woman not with an actual pregnancy, but opts instead for a skinny, possibly implanted, and impossibly fantastic, Photoshoped depiction of fertility. (A subject whose starvation would surely make them infertile.)

In an age where so many who wish to have a child are unable, those who can show off their success with midriff baring maternity wear. Pregnancy, like everything else, is both status and commodity.

If I as a feminist cannot judge someone for making unhealthy choices surrounding getting pregnant, such as being anorexic or waiting until mid-to-late thirties, what's all this judging of women who have babies before we're absolutely, financially ready for them? Or women who have babies and not a perfectly stable relationship? Or women who have babies "too young"?

Women who manage to get pregnant without enough body fat are endangering their own health. It doesn't matter so much to the baby because fetuses don't live off of body fat. They are nourished directly from their mother's bloodstream.

There *is* a correlation between women who wait to have babies and the incidence of disorders stemming from chromosomal anomalies. The older you get, the more likely you are to produce eggs with broken chromosomes or the wrong number of them. If you find this an acceptable risk just so you can afford a high-end carseat and all the latest baby fashions, knock yourself out.

Meanwhile, you don't have to have money to have a baby. That's why we have, um, *Medicaid.* I qualified for it when I was a poor college student. Lots of other women qualify for it. We then also qualify for other programs that help us raise our kids. Is that the best way to have kids, necessarily? Depends on what your goals are, I guess. If you want to be young enough to chase your kids around later, reduce the chance you've died of old-age diseases by the time they graduate high school, etc., then I guess you want your kids sooner. If it doesn't matter then wait til later. But if one group of people isn't supposed to criticize the choices made then no group can.

By the way, it's hardly a feminist stance to go along with what the patriarchy encourages us to do instead of digging in your heels and fighting it. If the patriarchy is encouraging us to put off kids til later or to not have them at all because that's inconvenient for them, wouldn't that be your first clue that you should maybe design your own path?