Why I Hid My Pregnancy From Instagram
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It seemed almost rude to show up so pregnant to a long-delayed reunion with my former editor without telling him first. I consider him a mentor, and a friend, so I tried to text the news as I drew closer. “Btw,” I tapped, five blocks from the coffee shop where we were set to meet. “I’ve been pretty private about this, but I’m actually … very pregnant.” Awkward! Neurotic! I tried again: “Fyi! Pregnant, not bloated.”
Everything I typed 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.
It’s not that I set out to keep my pregnancy a secret, per se—but the news has felt too vulnerable, too exposing, too complex to share widely. And in delaying the announcement, I’ve joined a quiet movement of soon-to-be parents who concealed their pregnancies. 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 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 turned proud older brother/sister. Some posters even spring for posed professional photo 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 that kind of news on a one-by-one basis.
But the Covid-19 pandemic and the rise of remote work changed that logic for some parents. On the internet, it turns out, nobody knows that you’re pregnant unless you tell them. Many pregnant people, liberated from the biases of their colleagues and the unsolicited opinions of their relatives, decided to keep the big news to themselves. Others have reportedly grown wary of such announcements since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade and freed prosecutors in some deep-red states to target pregnant people who suffer stillbirths and miscarriages. Additionally, 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 other people 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 helped 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 stern in policing their reactions. “We’re not doing ‘congratulations’ yet,” I’d say 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 check-up.
When it was just us, my husband and I called the growing cell mass 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. “Statistically, your odds are still very good,” she told me, but the promise of statistics didn’t move me. Some people defy all the odds, after all. Olympians. Jackpot-winners. People killed by vending machines.
I would believe Sprout was healthy, I told my husband, only after I scrutinized 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, and it’s hard not to conflate real danger with lingering fears.
As we reached 22 weeks, then 25, my mom began to nag me about preparing. 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 profound I cried upon feeling it. The idea of translating this tangle I was feeling into words and commodifying it for public consumption taxed my sleep-deprived brain and encouraged further procrastination. The algorithms knew I was pregnant by now, too; Instagram served me a steady buffet of other families’ stylized pregnancy reveals. But I cringed away from these shiny, unguarded people who seemed to share none of my hard-earned fears.
[pullquote align='center']The idea of translating this tangle I was feeling into words and commodifying it for public consumption taxed my sleep-deprived brain and encouraged further procrastination.”[/pullquot
In fairness, I’m sure many parents announce with greater nuance than the viral reels and Pinterest-perfect templates I was served. But the conventions of the pregnancy announcement genre, overall, don’t lend themselves to subtlety or complication. 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 that social media is performative. “Big-reveal content,” the sociologist and writer Kathryn Jezer-Morton 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. This, however, felt different and rare: the first “personal news” so precious to me that I had to hoard it for myself—even once we painted the nursery, washed her tiny clothes, and relaxed into the knowledge that the odds were finally good.
Ten days ago, on a blustery Buffalo Saturday, we even consented to a small shower. Most of the attendees, some of our closest friends, had known about Sprout since the week of my test. They’d sent baked goods and condolences after each prior loss; they knew, without my posting it, that we were “grateful” and “blessed.”
Afterwards, the friend tasked with taking photos sent me some pictures from the afternoon. I loved the laughing candids, the daisy bouquets, the balloons swagged around a Karl Marx statue. I still didn’t post any online, however. My feelings seemed too unwieldy for that: I was grateful and blessed, but also humbled and scared and hopeful and tired and neurotic. No Instagram caption could sum all that up; besides, who’s looking for summations?
If all goes to plan, Sprout arrives in two weeks. It feels like a miracle just to type those words. I am dying to see her tiny, wrinkled face, thus far only glimpsed on low-res ultrasound photos. But don’t wait on the Instagram post, please—I think that I might be done with all that. Performing pregnancy online felt hollow to me, and I expect the idea of performing motherhood to feel the same.
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