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Why do stories about morning sickness inspire such rage?

Hyperemesis gravidarum is a terrible affliction, whatever the Mail says.
Hyperemesis gravidarum is a terrible affliction, whatever the Mail says. Photograph: stock_colors/Getty Images/iStockphoto

You can tell when the Daily Mail disapproves of something because it puts it in capital letters, so it feels as though you, the reader, are being shouted at, which is confusing. How can it be your fault? You only just found out.

Anyway, the Mail is very angry with pregnant women: 20,000 ambulances (or “up to”, so it could be any number) are despatched every year for morning sickness. What a shameful waste of NHS resources. Those women should just eat a ginger biscuit and stop moaning, like it says in baby manuals from the 50s.

In fact, there is a perfectly sound reason why a person might call an ambulance for morning sickness: if it’s bad enough, it feels like you’re dying. It’s like a panic attack; you don’t know it won’t kill you till afterwards. I don’t know that from personal experience; rather, I wrote a piece about hyperemesis gravidarum and got the most unbelievable response. A woman told me she had to terminate her second pregnancy because, the first time, she had seriously considered suicide. A woman I interviewed for a piece about German pensions told me she had flown to Canada to get medication that wasn’t certified in the UK. It is life-changingly bad. It’s not “like regular morning sickness, only worse”.

But that wasn’t the unbelievable bit. No, the main outpouring was from angry men, heaps of angry emails, noodling on a theme: women have been doing this for centuries. What makes you so special that you think anyone wants to hear about your tedious nausea? Yawn! I’m so unspeakably bored that it has put me in this violent temper of pure boredom!

Medicine has a record of minimising female pain, underinvestigating, undertreating, ascribing it to psychological sources. So it’s not unique to pregnancy, but the business of growing fresh humans does seem to arouse an animus all its own. The key note is always “many women have come before you”, sometimes followed up by “women in [insert developing nation or most often the entire continent of Africa, which is actually pretty varied, medically speaking] have it far worse – they have to give birth on their own by a river and you don’t hear them complaining”. The anxiety seems to be that women think of themselves as exceptional when they are pregnant; and if you let them get away with that, who knows where it will end? I don’t think it’s true: I don’t think any woman thinks she’s the first, or will be the last, or is in any way special (I’m pretty sure emotions range across the spectrum, from fat and cross to elated and filled with wonder, often in the course of 15 minutes). I can’t say with any certainty, though, because women don’t all feel the same.

The cultural fear persists once the baby is out. They say new mothers are tedious, but so are a lot of things: queueing, dentists, Start the Week. Nobody gets angry at ennui. There’s a savagery directed at the whole maternal package that has an Enid Blyton tang, the swift, brutal twitch of a group against the girl who got above herself.

Before they write their shouty headlines and wring their hands over “who do these mothers and mothers-to-be think they are?”, people should ask themselves: what’s the worst that could happen? If everyone who had a baby did, indeed, think she was the cat’s pyjamas, the No 1, the Eiffel Tower, how bad would that be, really? It would probably be fine. We would all just be a bit more relaxed.