On why it is not OK to look pregnant when you are pregnant.

I have discovered that the perception of feminine bodily perfection covers many stages of a woman's life and is not just limited to the youthful female form.

Pregnancy, it seems, does not escape judgement. A pregnant woman should apparently put on very litte weight, carry her bump high, appear almost unpregnant from the back and have many people say how compact and neat her pregnancy is.

For me and the throngs of women I see at the maternity hospital, this is bad news. Our general weight gain and roundness and the fact that we actually look like we are pregnant seems apparently to count against us.

But I don't want to look like I'm not pregnant. I am pregnant! I have put on a bit of weight, some of my weight has moved around but I'm building a baby! I don't want to be compared to anyone with regard to the shape of my body, and especially not to naturally thin women who carry their baby in a neat rugby ball stuffed up their jumper (although this, for info, is apparently the definition of pregnancy perfection).

The zeitgeist seems to be small bumps. It's all 'Sporty Mum's! Women who run marathons right up until they're 10cm dilated! Wear your old clothes all the way through your pregnancy!' No celebration of normality, no deference to the complicated business of what's going on inside, it's all about how we look on the outside. I don't understand the seemingly constant desire to minimise the size of women; the definition of perfection is getting smaller and smaller. It really feels like the ideal would be for us all to be tiny little Alices in a world full of tall and manly men.

It's not just the media either. A colleague at work is five months pregnant but has lost a stone in weight because she's been so ill with morning sickness. Another colleague said to me, "Doesn't she look fabulous? You'd hardly know she was five months pregnant. She's carrying the baby really neatly!" Neatly! But she lost a stone in weight from being unable to hold down food, at a time in her life when the food you eat is even more vital than usual. That is not fabulous.

I think that women are judged physically at every point in their lives; as children we are picked (or not picked) to be May Queens, teenagers think size zero is the height of aspiration, the twenty somethings try diet after diet and are encouraged to eat cereal instead of lunch in order to drop a dress size. Shouldn't pregnancy be the one time when this pressure stops? Is not even pregnancy sacred?

Weight gain in pregancy has to do with many things like having some reserves for breastfeeding. It's normal and natural and it makes me really sad to be part of a society where it feels like women may not even bloom during pregancy. The ideal pregancy shouldn't be anything. It shouldn't be tiny, thin women with bumps on their fronts, looking as much like they're not pregnant as is humanly possible, it should just be women, being pregnant in their own way and shape carrying their babies to term in the way that their body chooses.