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

TL;DR: During the first 12 weeks of gestation, participants’ accounts demonstrated multiple influences on their understanding of their pregnancy as at risk, which resonated with the management of uncertainty than risk per se, and thus offer new perspectives to the study of pregnancy within the social sciences.

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’, de...