Maternity trousers, complete with baggy sack big enough to hide in: the Edith Pritchett cartoon

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Experience: my babies were born seven weeks apart

After years of miscarriages, I had abandoned the prospect of giving birth. Then, as we prepared to conceive using a surrogate, the impossible happened

The first time I miscarried, I blamed myself. After getting pregnant early on in our relationship, at 34, I had a flash of doubt that my partner Alex and I weren’t ready to be parents. Then, a few weeks later, the pregnancy was over.

My second early loss, just a few months later, hit me harder. We went to a fertility specialist, and the tests on both of us came back clear, but then I couldn’t get pregnant at all.

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How social media tries to exploit your pregnancy | Letters

Responding to an article by Kathryn Wheeler, readers describe how apps ‘found out’ they were pregnant and fed them worrying posts and targeted advertising

I am so glad to see an article published about the impact of social media on pregnant people and new mothers (‘I felt doomed’: social media guessed I was pregnant – and my feed soon grew horrifying, 3 September). I say “mothers” as I noticed my husband was not subjected to the same algorithms that I was. I, too, found it completely overwhelming when I was pregnant and have come off all social media, as the suggested reels I was barraged with did nothing but create anxiety for me as a new parent.

I decided it was toxic messaging that I didn’t need to be privy to. As there are lots of positive things happening on social media – eg groups connecting you with local new mums – it was a shame to miss out on what could have been happening in my area.

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Don’t call it morning sickness: ‘At times in my pregnancy I wondered if this was death coming for me’ – podcast

The Victorians called it ‘pernicious vomiting of pregnancy’, but modern medicine has offered no end to the torture of hyperemesis gravidarum – until now.

By Abi Stephenson. Read by Nicolette Chin

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‘I watched the bombs fall. I watched the mothers’: how do we grieve the children of Gaza?

Palestine is not a metaphor. And yet – I’ve superimposed every experience of my own mothering these last months on to Palestine

The last time I carried a life, I got to hear her heartbeat exactly three times before it stopped. It was my fifth pregnancy. After the final appointment, the one where the surgeon furrowed her brow as she looked at the ultrasound, I walked down First Avenue. It was winter. It was the year after the pandemic had begun. I was feral with grief. I snapped at strangers, cried in the bodega, etc. I’d spent a year getting pregnant, then unpregnant. I’d wake in the middle of the night and remember: heartbeat, heartbeat. At times, I felt absurd for my grief. I couldn’t ascertain what the metric of a mother was, what goalpost had to be met. Had I met it? Surely grief like this – love like this – had to be more deeply earned?

Three years later, I went under anesthesia again for another egg retrieval. At this point, I had a baby, nearly 18 months old. The surgery was on 6 October. The fertility doctor was cheery at my bedside when I woke; I now had a new crew of eggs on ice. I took a Lyft home. That afternoon, dazed on the couch, I watched sitcoms. The next day, I watched the news break: one urgent report after the other, in English, in Arabic, repeating the same details in different order: surprise attack, dawn, rockets, metal fence bulldozed, hostages taken, raids, combatants, dozens killed, no, hundreds killed, 16-year siege. Then I watched a city go dark. I watched water get cut. I watched the first bombs fall. I watched the mothers.

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‘I felt doomed’: social media guessed I was pregnant – and my feed soon grew horrifying

The algorithm knew I was expecting before I had had a chance to tell my family, friends or GP. At first, I was served up joyful videos. Then the tone became much darker ...

I don’t remember where I was when my TikTok feed showed me a video of a woman holding her stillborn baby, but I remember how I felt. At first, it appeared like any other video of a woman holding a newborn. It was tightly wrapped in blankets while she cradled it in her arms. She was crying, but so are most of the women in these post-birth videos. It wasn’t until I read the caption that I realised what I was looking at. Her baby had been delivered at 23 weeks. I was 22 weeks pregnant. I felt doomed.

My social media algorithms knew I was pregnant before family, friends or my GP. Within 24-hours, they were transforming my feeds. On Instagram and TikTok, I would scroll through videos of women recording themselves as they took pregnancy tests, just as I had done. I “liked”, “saved”, and “shared” the content, feeding the machine, showing it that this is how it could hold my attention, compelling it to send me more. So it did. But it wasn’t long before the joy of those early videos started to transform into something dark.

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Pregnant or a new mum? How to cut costs when you’re expecting a baby

From free prescriptions and essential vitamins, to statutory maternity pay, a lot of assistance is available

Pregnant women in England are entitled to free NHS prescriptions during pregnancy and for 12 months after giving birth, whether they are employed or not. (In Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, they are free for everyone.) You need a maternity exemption certificate, which you can get from a midwife, doctor or health visitor.

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