No, Pregnancy Is Not 'Bad' for Women

When I was growing up, my late father—a doctor—used to disparage the pathologizing of pregnancy, insisting, “pregnancy is not a disease.” That lesson served me well during my first pregnancy, when we lived in a small town in southern Mexico. My Mexican doctor laughed when I asked about the tests and supplements usually considered routine in the U.S. (he told me I could take some vitamins if I wanted). But I was in my 20s (a good time to be pregnant for the first time), and my son was born healthy shortly after we returned to the U.S. and is now an economics professor. 

Even so, some popular influencers today seek to pathologize pregnancy and try to convince young women that pregnancy is bad for them. For example, there is Abigail Porter of the Substack, “The List,” who has half a million followers and details all the reasons not to get pregnant, including a host of physical problems. This same influencer has 1.2 million followers on TikTok with posts such as “women are more likely to be killed by their sons than by strangers.” Another influencer with a viral list of 350 reasons not to give birth is Yunuen Arias “who knows a lot about children because she’s an early childhood education student.” Her reasons include a multitude of physical ailments, including “constant back pain,” “constant fever,” and “sh***ing yourself while pregnant.” 

A Natural Part of Being a Woman

Without ignoring the reality of the physical costs of pregnancy for women, it is safe to say that pregnancy overall is not cataclysmic for most women. For one, if it were, none of us would be here, as we are all descended from generations of women who got pregnant and gave birth. The female body was designed to give birth. If anything is a natural part of life for women, it’s childbearing. For most of our existence on this planet, we were subsistence foragers or hunters and gatherers, and in those societies, childbearing was likely nearly universal among women as it is in almost all the foraging societies studied more recently. What is new and unnatural in human societies is a large percentage of women not having any children at all. 

For most of our existence on this planet, childbearing was likely nearly universal for women. What is new and unnatural in human societies is a large percentage of women not having any children at all. 

Further, there is evidence that there are positive health effects of pregnancy, in addition to the sense of well-being that many expectant mothers experience. For example, the U.S. National Cancer Institute notes that women who have a full-term pregnancy at an early age (before age 30) have a reduced risk of developing breast cancer (the most common cancer in women) later in life. Women who have a first full-term pregnancy before the age of 20 have about half the risk of developing breast cancer as women whose first full-term pregnancy occurs after the age of 30. The more children a woman has, the lower her risk of breast cancer. A woman who has given birth to five or more children has half the breast cancer risk of woman who has not given birth. Women who have had a full-term pregnancy also have reduced risks of ovarian and endometrial cancers, and the risks of these cancers also decline with each additional full-term pregnancy. 

Breastfeeding itself has positive links with a decline in the risk of cancer. A recent study in the journal Cancer Medicine found that for women in the UK, the risk of breast cancer is reduced by 4.3% for every 12 months of breastfeeding, this is in addition to the 7.0% decrease in risk observed for each birth.  Longer and exclusive breastfeeding has also been associated with a reduced risk of endometriosis.

The female body was designed to give birth. If anything is a natural part of life for women, it’s childbearing.

After cancer and heart disease, the most common category of disease in the U.S. is autoimmune disease, which affects approximately 8% of the population or about 22 million persons, 78% of whom are women. This means that autoimmune diseases are among the most common preexisting diseases in pregnancy, and there is evidence that the symptoms of some of the more common autoimmune diseases, including multiple sclerosis, rheumatoid arthritis, and Crohn’s disease, often improve during pregnancy. 

The Mental Health Benefits of Having Kids

Of course, the benefits of pregnancy and childbearing go well beyond these physical benefits, including the mental health benefits of raising a child and forming a family. The vast majority of women find that having children is a positive good, as shown by the evidence in a new IFS report that married women with children are happier than other women and find more meaning in life.

Perhaps as a result, women (and men) with children are less likely to commit suicide. A recent study of all individuals born in Sweden between 1967 and 1985 found that mothers were less likely to commit suicide than non-mothers, even after adjusting for sociodemographic, labor market, and psychiatric factors, and the protective effect of having children increased with more children. Mothers with one child were 70% less likely to commit suicide, while mothers with three children were 93% less likely. (For fathers the results were similar but a little less dramatic). Similar results have been found in the United States.

In sum, while there are many physical changes that women undergo during pregnancy, the idea that pregnancy and childbearing are somehow “bad" is unfounded. In fact, there are many positive health effects of having a baby and breastfeeding, including a lower risk of breast and other common cancers and reduced symptoms of several common autoimmune diseases. All in all, it cannot be concluded that pregnancy and childbearing are “bad for you,” and a good argument can be made that the reverse is true.

Rosemary L. Hopcroft is Professor Emerita of Sociology at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. She is the author of Evolution and Gender: Why it matters for contemporary life (Routledge 2016), editor of The Oxford Handbook of Evolution, Biology, & Society (Oxford, 2018), and author (with Martin Fieder and Susanne Huber) of Not So Weird After All: The Changing Relationship Between Status and Fertility (Routledge, 2024).