‘I think it’s self-preservation’: risk perception and secrecy in early pregnancy

Abstract

Withholding news of a pregnancy from wider family and friends for the first 12 weeks of gestation is a familiar aspect of the contemporary experience of pregnancy in Britain. In this article, I explore this convention, drawing on interviews conducted in Scotland between 2012 and 2013, with 15 women experiencing a full-term pregnancy for the first time. For the participants in this research, the maintenance of secrecy was a response to their understanding that the risk of a pregnancy loss was at its highest during this stage of gestation. Respondents often articulated their interpretation of this risk in terms of statistics, derived from medical sources. These were substantiated by knowledge of pregnancy losses amongst family and friends, but also by their own ambiguous embodied experiences at this time. Accounts of early gestation resonated with Rothman’s notion of the ‘tentative pregnancy’, a concept rarely invoked outside discussions of prenatal testing. In line with efforts not to get ‘too excited’, demonstrating emotion work, women delayed the announcement of their pregnancy until they perceived the risk of a pregnancy loss to have decreased. During the first 12 weeks of gestation, participants’ accounts demonstrated multiple influences on their understanding of their pregnancy as at risk. Further, their experiences more often resonated with the management of uncertainty than risk per se, and thus offer new perspectives to the study of pregnancy within the social sciences.

Keywords:

• tentative pregnancy
• emotion work
• miscarriage
• risk
• uncertainty

Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank the 15 women who participated in this research. The author is also very grateful to Martyn Pickersgill, Andy Alaszewski and two anonymous reviewers for their valuable advice and comments on this article. Many thanks too to Sarah Cunningham-Burley and Jeni Harden for their input into the research on which this article draws.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by a Principal’s Career Development Scholarship from the University of Edinburgh.