As birth rates decline, is pregnancy now an aspirational aesthetic?

Nara Smith recently announced her fourth pregnancy in a now-viral IG reel. Her round belly poking out between a silky top and flowy skirt, cradled by perfectly manicured hands, her hair and make-up immaculate, it was presented as the ultimate aspirational moment. Lately, it seems like more and more people are enticed by the beauty of baby bumps (and this isn’t just my pregnancy talking). Make-up artists share tips on achieving the coveted “pregnancy glow”, even if you’re not actually pregnant. Fashion and beauty influencers share pregnancy fits or bump care routines. Pregnancy has even become an official beauty category, complete with belly sheets and oils. 

You can see it in the celebrity and fashion world too: Rihanna, Sienna Miller, Slick Woods and Adwoa Aboah bared their bump at peak fashion moments, earning praise for their pregnancy style (“Is Rihanna going to influence us into having kids?” a Dazed article asked in 2022). Meanwhile, designers like Collina Strada, Nensi Dojaka, Sinead O’Dwyer and Di Petsa spotlight pregnant models on their runways. “Women are always socialised to lose weight, to hold in their stomachs, to become small. When you’re pregnant, it becomes the opposite. You grow, expand and can take up space – physically, but also mental space, with your presence, ideas and voice,” Di Petsa designer Dimitra Petsa tells Dazed on her inclusion of pregnancy in her collections.

This visibility is new. Throughout history, pregnancy was often hidden from public and cultural view. Although culture has long revered signs of fertility in women, pregnancy itself once carried a certain taboo. It was visible proof of sexual activity – a direct contradiction to ideals of feminine purity – and was often seen as indecorous, even inappropriate for public display. Seeing pregnancy in public felt too intimate, even unpleasant. During the Renaissance, when a woman entered her third trimester, she remained at home in a practice called confinement. Similarly, pregnant women in the Victorian era were expected to isolate and withdraw from society completely. Many wore special corsets to hide their bumps as long as possible.

The perception of bumps didn’t start to change until the 20th century. A watershed moment came in 1991, when Demi Moore posed nude and seven months pregnant for the cover of Vanity Fair. It caused such outrage that some stores refused to stock the magazine. Others hid the cover in packaging usually reserved for pornography. But the issue sold 500,000 more copies than predicted, and gained the magazine 75,000 new subscribers, breaking the taboo of visible pregnancy in the process. Since then, the milestone has become a marketable moment, as fashion lecturer Liza Betts noted in the Guardian, “pregnancy, motherhood, and fertility are seen as another selling point” for celebrities.

Today, baby bumps are not just accepted, but aesthetically aspirational. With the cost-of-living crisis, climate insecurity and our increasingly demanding work schedules, having children has become a luxury status symbol, Eugene Healey, a brand strategy consultant, argued in a recent video. Whether dressed in a custom runway look or flaunted on an influencer’s artfully domestic grid, babies and bumps are viewed as an accessory to the mother’s life. Healey ends his video with a joke: “I’ve solved the challenge of declining birth rates – just make it cool!” 

To boost birth rates, the US (notorious for its poor healthcare system and gendered, limited parental leave) recently explored ideas like a $5,000 baby bonus and a national medal of motherhood (to mothers with six or more children), chillingly similar to one introduced by the Nazis – all the while stripping away reproductive rights, including overturning Roe v Wade. Hungary, Poland and Italy have all introduced pronatalist policies like financial bonuses and tax breaks for big families, while chiselling away the rights of queer families, single parents and those seeking abortion. Social media is ripe with misinformation about hormonal birth control, while both manosphere and trad wife-adjacent influencers frame procreation as a sacred duty.

Alongside conservative policies, conservative beauty ideals increasingly dominate our feeds, faces and bodies. Under these ideals, pregnant women are celebrated as beautiful because they’re fulfilling their “natural” roles of graceful wives and mothers. Many of the influencers who achieve success fit these beauty ideals: they’re often young with glowing skin, accompanied by a doting partner, and effortlessly photographed in under-the-bump maxi skirts. Just look at TikTok’s Belly Only trend, which celebrates the beauty of a growing bump while other changes (hormonal eczema, stomach hair and leaky nipples, to name a few of my own) stay unnoticeable. 

“Creating and sustaining life is such a privilege, but we’re constantly bombarded with unrealistic Western standards of beauty, which don’t stop at pregnancy or postpartum,” says Amrit Tietz, co-founder of motherhood platform Spread The Jelly. “It’s glamourised in a way that isn’t true to life. Pregnancy is beautiful, but it can also be sticky and overwhelming.” 

There is also the extreme pressure women face to regain their pre-pregnancy bodies, weeks after giving birth. In her book Pixel Flesh, Ellen Atlanta notes that many turn to rigid diets or workouts before they’re medically cleared. The mommy makeover (a plastic surgery package including a breast lift, tummy tuck and liposuction) is becoming increasingly popular. Trad wife Hannah Neeleman famously competed in the 2024 Mrs World pageant 12 days after giving birth.

Co-host of the motherhood and career podcast Ready or Not, Lucinda McKimm, admits she was ashamed by the negativity she felt towards her postpartum body. “My once taut tummy now looks about 16 weeks pregnant. While I wish the ‘you just grew a human’ rhetoric was enough for a mum to feel good about herself, for a lot of us, it’s not.”

The conservative beauty norms dominating our feeds leave little room for pregnancy being anything but a beautiful bump on an otherwise thin body. But mothers are claiming space of their own. McKimm recently dedicated a Substack to her postpartum body. “By talking about mine, others might feel better about their conflicting relationship with theirs. The response was overwhelming,” she says. Spread The Jelly is equally dedicated to sharing “the diverse spectrum of pregnancy and motherhood,” including personal stories about IVF, surrogacy, queer parenthood and more. “Women write to us that we’ve made them feel heard, which is the most rewarding thing,” says Tietz. 

All the mothers I spoke to agreed that pregnancy is beautiful. But we should be wary of the conditions under which baby bumps are idolised, and whether they actually benefit women.