What to Expect When You’re Expecting is the title of a particular sort of pregnancy self-help book that has been circulating for years on both sides of the Atlantic (originally published in 1984, it is now in its fourth edition). Full of colour pictures and To Do lists, it is also a grim warning of everything that can go wrong for the pregnant body, from the supposed risks of ingesting mayonnaise to amniocentesis. It is in many ways a conservative and rather dated product of a boom industry, full of drawings of well-fed, straight Anglo-Saxon couples.
These days, things have shifted a little. The particular, rather stolid, sometimes jokey, stereotypes of heterosexuals having babies that have saturated the media for decades – remember Knocked Up, Parenthood, the TV show Thirtysomething; Parenting magazine? – seem a world away from the sliding sexual identities of Transparent. Maggie Nelson’s book The Argonauts, is a whole generation on from, say, Jayne Anne Philips’s MotherKind. Even Tina Cassidy’s Birth, a superb account of the medical history of pregnancy, was written straight up. Nowadays, birth control applies to how one might control making a baby as well as how not to.
Related: The foul reign of the biological clock | Moira Weigel
Related: The row about abortion term limits is demeaning to pregnant women | Chitra Ramaswamy
Continue reading...from Pregnancy | The Guardian http://ift.tt/1XC9hwv
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