On the internet, nobody knows you’re pregnant
A plea + a personal announcement
Friend, reader, internet stranger … where the hell to begin with this one. I’m writing today to share personal news that I’ve kept a secret for many long months.
In 2023, as some of you know, I lost three pregnancies in the span of a year. I last wrote about that experience for Links last June, in this essay about AI, grief and miscarriage.
Behind the scenes, however, and away from this page, there have been other developments. First, I was referred around this time last year to a local fertility clinic. Then I reported for a battery of tests. I spent hours each week getting needled and scanned. By May, the specialist concluded that the cause of my problems, if one existed, was beyond our collective diagnostic grasp.
By June, she’d cleared my husband Jason and I to “try again,” in that super-sexy clinic parlance. On July 19, at three weeks and one day, a blood test confirmed I was pregnant again. And ever since then, for reasons unpacked in the essay below, I’ve largely hid my pregnancy from the internet. I am, as of this writing, 38 weeks along — so the birth of our daughter is … imminent.
Keeping this secret from you was both inconvenient and vaguely, uncomfortably deceitful. I have struggled mightily for solid subscriber recs because I only read books about infants right now. I have dropped a few posts because … insomnia! Also: endless appointments; surprise ultrasounds. As I near my due date, I’ve also grown nervous about the prospect of pausing Links to take leave. It’s only been 10 months since I relaunched the newsletter — this baby, like her mother, has dreadful timing.
You have all, however, been fantastically supportive since I left my job as a reporter at The Buffalo News and struck out on my own. Many of you have shared this newsletter with your own networks and friends, for which I am so incredibly grateful.
Roughly 2.5% of you are also paid supporters, which has helped make this Substack my main source of income. As a self-employed writer, I don’t receive paid parental leave, health insurance or any of the other benefits that come with a traditional media job. Instead, I am relying on the continued support of paid Links subscribers to let me take time to bond with my newborn.
During that leave, Links will publish from the archives on an altered schedule, and new writing will be reserved exclusively for paid supporters. As a thank you, one lucky paid sub will also get to name our firstborn.
… lol, kidding. She already has a name! And I don’t trust you weirdos. Linksy McLinkface probably won’t play in a kindergarten classroom. But you WILL receive Links’ first-ever, snail-mail zine, shipped directly to an address of your choosing. And you will be privy to my earliest, rawest writing about Sprout, as we call her, and parenting.
I won’t lie: This is a mildly terrifying moment for both me and Links. If you’ve ever thought about upgrading to a paid subscription … now is the time, truly. Independent writers like me rely directly on reader support. Your subscription — at $7 a month, or roughly three-quarters the cost of a small box of diapers — will help sustain this newsletter during my leave and ensure it’s going strong when I return.
I’d specifically love to sign on 120 new supporters before Sprout arrives. That would help me cover ongoing administrative costs that don’t pause while I’m out — legal, accounting, media subs, postage, etc. — as well as a portion of the $8000 bill we expect to get from the hospital. 🫠
If you can’t subscribe now, that’s also okay. I still appreciate you so much. Every time you forward my writing, that also helps. As does every comment in the Substack app and every post shared on social media.
I’ll share more details about my leave next week, assuming Sprout doesn’t drop by early. Until then, thank you for being here — and for making this journey with me.
On the internet, nobody knows you’re pregnant
It seemed almost rude to show up so pregnant to a long-delayed reunion with my former editor. I consider him a mentor and a personal friend, so I tried to text the news as I drew closer. “Btw,” I tapped, five blocks from the coffee shop. “I’ve been pretty private about this, but I’m actually … very pregnant.” Awkward! Neurotic! I tried again: “Fyi! Pregnant, not bloated.”
Everything sounded self-conscious and weird, and my hands were growing stiff with cold, so I scowled, gave up on the whole attempt and pocketed my phone. My mentor would find out soon enough, I reasoned, and in the same way that a lot of people learned of our “big news”: haphazardly, belatedly and — in defiance of long-standing millennial norms — not through social media.
My first child is now arriving in a matter of days, and most of my social and professional networks have no earthly idea. Apart from a single vague post to an alt Instagram account, I’ve largely hid this pregnancy from social media.
It’s not that I set out to keep a secret, per se — but the news has felt too vulnerable, too exposing, too complex. And in delaying the announcement, I’ve joined a quiet movement of soon-to-be parents who concealed their pregnancies from the internet. Some are motivated by a growing social awareness of infertility and pregnancy loss; others by privacy concerns, post-Roe anxieties or a distaste for performative social media mommy culture. On TikTok alone, thousands of posts now celebrate what’s known as the baby “hard launch”: announcing a new arrival only after they’re born.
“The new pregnancy announcement is no announcement,” the journalist and commentator Fortesa Latifi declared in a viral TikTok last December. In one recent-ish study, researchers called reluctance to post pregnancy reveals an “under-investigated” wrinkle of digital culture.
Things were simpler, surely, in the days before Instagram. Since the early 2010s, however, the glossy, much-aestheticized pregnancy post has become a rite of parental passage. Frequently, it features an ultrasound print; sometimes, a photo of a bewildered dog or prior kid. Some posters even spring for posed professional shoots and stylized Etsy announcement templates.
Those rituals continue in many circles as both a practical necessity and a mid-30s flex: Nothing gins up engagement like the promise of new life; plus, it’s tedious to dole out personal updates on a personal, one-by-one basis. But the Covid-19 pandemic and the rise of remote work also changed the logic for some parents. On the internet, it turns out, nobody knows you’re pregnant … unless you decide to tell them.
Suddenly many pregnant people, liberated from the biases of their colleagues and the unsolicited opinions of their relatives, chose to guard the big news up until, and even after, the due date itself. Others have reportedly grown more private since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, freeing some prosecutors to target pregnant people who suffer stillbirths and miscarriages in deep-red states. A growing cultural awareness of infertility and pregnancy loss may also play a role: One psychologist told POPSUGAR she’s seen patients go dark because they fear their posts could trigger others in their social circle.
I don’t doubt that these factors underlie the growing allure of the non-announcement, in part because they all influenced my own decision. As a self-employed freelancer, I worried about how potential editors and Substack subscribers would react to the prospect of my pending leave. I hoped to avoid unwanted belly rubs and unwelcome advice about maternity. Most importantly, I suffered three consecutive miscarriages in 2023, and had long since abandoned the naive belief that all pregnancies proceed skippingly from conception to birth. If something went wrong again, I only wanted to tell the close friends and family who had cradled us before.
“I’m not telling you to tell you,” I told one friend in July, the very day that I got my positive test. “I’m telling you so that it’s easier to get to the point if and when I have another miscarriage.”
This is, in all fairness, a dreadful burden to put on one’s friends. I could be, and often was, a bit of a bitch about their reactions. “We’re not doing ‘congratulations’ yet,” I’d say, severely, to my loved ones’ heartfelt felicitations. “Can you please call it an embryo?” I demanded of the nurse who referenced a “Baby Dewey” at our six-week appointment.
To each other, Jason and I called this budding idea Sprout: a vague name for a hopeful thing I nonetheless viewed with suspicion. After our third loss, we’d spent thousands of dollars on the services of a soft-spoken endocrinologist. She X-rayed my ovaries, graded my eggs and ultimately reached no real conclusions. “Your odds are still very good,” she said, but promising statistics failed to move me. Some people defy all the odds, after all. Olympians. Jackpot-winners. Vending machine casualties.
I would believe Sprout was healthy, I told Jason, only after scrutinizing her humanoid form at our 20-week scan. Then I might feel ready to tell more people that we were expecting again.
But even when that scan came back clean, I found new reasons to delay the reveal. You hear all sorts of horrors in loss support groups; you conflate real danger with lingering fears. As we reached 22 weeks, then 25, my mom began to nag me about preparations. I had purchased nothing, planned nothing, read no books — told no distant relations.
I worried that any groundwork for Sprout’s impending birth would invite the universe to quash it. More than that, as the second trimester passed, I found myself shredded by contradictions: Hopeful agony. Sharp dagger joy. Love so acute that I cried to feel it. The idea of wrangling that tangle into a post taxed my shrinking, sleep-deprived brain beyond any possibility of action.
The algorithms knew I was pregnant now, too; Instagram served me a steady buffet of other families’ stylized pregnancy reveals. But I cringed away from these shiny summer children who seemed to share none of my hard-earned fears. Some appeared to have booked photo shoots or hosted whole-ass showers before their dating scans. They floated through their blithe, photogenic pregnancies with the confidence that misfortune couldn’t happen to them. I saw this so often I coined a term to shorthand my seething: “Pregnancy privilege again,” I’d tell Jason, as some influencer whooped up a positive test in my Instagram feed.
I’m sure many parents do announce with greater nuance than the viral reels I saw. But the conventions of the pregnancy announcement genre don’t lend themselves to subtlety or complication, overall. Parents are forever and always excited. (If you want to be edgy, maybe “joyful” or “blessed.”) Their dreams have come true. Their family is growing. They’re smitten. They’re grateful. They’re … oddly attractive.
Even for parents who conceive easily, with textbook gestations and straightforward births, the form flattens the complexity of being pregnant — the chaos and doubt of the whole endeavor. I’m not original in pointing any of this out: We all understand, 15+ years in, that social media is performative. “Big-reveal content,” the sociologist and writer Kathryn Jezer-Morton recently declared, “is the ultimate commodification of our emotions.”
I’d just never felt so driven to resist that process, to defy the social mandate to stage myself. I’ve written a newsletter on and off for 10 years, so I’m used to spilling my proverbial guts in other people’s inboxes. But the internal process I went through this past year — the slow, halting journey toward acceptance that this baby truly was ours — was so incredibly profound and intimate that any effort to externalize it just seemed false.
That’s not a good look for a writer, surely: I should be able to “express” myself. And I am, I think — at least I’m trying, here — but not in a way that graphs comfortably onto mainstream internet conventions. For instance, I’m excited: I can tell you that. As an Instagram caption, it wouldn’t ring untrue. But it’s more accurate to say that I cry every time I sing the song for which we’ve named our daughter.
I am grateful. Of course I am. But that’s also cliche and reductive: Better to tell you I pray for Sprout every night. Me, a life-long atheist.
These vignettes are individual to me, of course, but I think they also speak to the reasons that others have turned on social media — in the context of being pregnant, sure, but also in general. Over the two decades that I’ve been online, these platforms have morphed from mutual exchanges, typically connecting family and friends, into always-on, one-way broadcast channels in which influencers, marketers, celebrities and try-hards battle for a sliver of attention.
Everyone’s performance is inherently heightened by virtue of being in the ring. The pressure to curate and self-optimize can exhaust and corrode you, even if you don’t personally or consciously post in pursuit of virality.
Speaking to Romper a few years ago, the journalist and parenting commentator Kelly Weill theorized that pregnancy non-announcements spring not from a desire to seem cool or blasé, but from a generalized fatigue with the rote act of posting. “People are communicating more in close circles,” she said — like group chats, DMs and in-person gatherings. Rather like my coffee meeting with that former editor, or the calls we made to friends at three weeks.
All of this has made me wonder, abstractly, if and what I’ll post of Sprout after she is born. My mom bought us matching outfits for the hospital: a robe for me, a wrap for her, a sweatshirt for Jason. But while I don’t doubt we’ll take the photo, and while I know I will treasure the hell out of it, I can’t say with any certainty that you’ll ever see it on the open internet.
Some things maintain their richness better, I think, when they aren’t posted on social media. They oxidize in the frenzied current of the feed, in the flattening gaze of the algorithm.
Some things, I think, you have to hoard for yourself — even in defiance of convention.
So this reveal is coming late, but: Fyi! Pregnant, not bloated.
A version of this essay also ran yesterday on elle.com with the headline “Why I hid my pregnancy from Instagram.” Elle is awesome, and I’m enormously grateful to the editors there for working with me on a tight turnaround and amidst a number of third-trimester disruptions.
If you are also struggling with infertility or perinatal loss, please know that I feel your pain on such a visceral level and am here if you ever want to vent to a sympathetic stranger. My local perinatal bereavement org was a huge resource for me; you can find similar resources online via Postpartum Support International.
Thank you again for being here. Subscribe today to keep Links going strong — your support while I’m on leave makes all the difference. 💛
Congratulations! I emailed you a while back about my own miscarriage story. I’m almost 36 weeks along now and STILL not fully comfortable telling people! I don’t think I will be until he’s on the outside. Best wishes for a lovely and smooth delivery!
can i double subscribe?!? 🍋🍋🍋