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The New Yorker drew criticism Thursday after promoting an essay that described the binary distinction between being pregnant and not pregnant as “misleading” and said a woman could be “kind of pregnant” or “a little bit pregnant.”
The essay, “The Unsettling Ambiguity of Early Pregnancy,” by Apoorva Tadepalli, examined the uncertainty surrounding early pregnancy tests, miscarriage and viability through the writer’s experience with multiple pregnancy losses and her current pregnancy.
The magazine promoted the piece on X by saying at-home tests capture only a moment when an embryo has implanted and that someone could be “kind of pregnant, a little bit pregnant, or almost pregnant, or maybe pregnant” while still testing positive.
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Los Angeles County Republican Party Chair Roxanne Hoge, a mother of four, told Fox News Digital that uncertainty over whether a pregnancy will remain viable does not change whether a woman is pregnant.
“As a mother of four and an actual biological woman, I must applaud the author for noticing that women do, in fact, make babies,” she said. “While I sympathize with her on the very sad reality of carrying a pregnancy after a loss, this was a lot of words to try and pretend that a fetus is a clump of cells. You’re either pregnant or you’re not.”
The New Yorker drew criticism after promoting an essay that said pregnancy tests create a “misleading” binary and that women can be “kind of pregnant” or “a little bit pregnant.” (iStock)
Elizabeth Barcohana, America First Policy Institute California ambassador to the America First Women’s initiative, said the distinction should be between the existence of a pregnancy and whether a woman knows that pregnancy is viable.
“A woman cannot be ‘a little bit pregnant.’ Pregnancy is a physical, biological state that begins when a fertilized embryo implants in the uterus and triggers a chemical hormonal reaction,” Barcohana said Thursday in a statement to Fox News Digital. “This article is not about being pregnant. It is about a woman’s experience about knowing whether she is carrying a viable healthy pregnancy.”
Tadepalli described testing positive during five pregnancies and spending periods of those pregnancies unsure whether she would miscarry. She said those experiences affected her ability to emotionally embrace her current pregnancy, with much of the essay examining what early testing can and cannot tell women about what will happen next.
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Elizabeth Barcohana told Fox News Digital the article was really about whether a woman knows she is carrying a viable pregnancy, not whether she is pregnant. (iStock)
Lisa Cusack, president of the Don’t L.A. My Burbank PAC, told Fox News Digital she viewed the article’s framing as an attempt to make pregnancy more subjective while arguing that uncertainty in early testing does not change whether a woman is pregnant.
“This article just seems like a tortured attempt to make pregnancy into a subject experience in order to justify abortion,” she said. “The fact that an at-home pregnancy isn’t sophisticated enough to pick up the beginning stages of every pregnancy doesn’t mean you’re ‘kind of pregnant,’ or that pregnancy itself, which literally begins with conception and ends with birth, is ‘nonlinear.’
“Women have always known that early pregnancies sometimes don’t take or show up on tests, but that doesn’t change the fact that you’re either pregnant or not, whether you know it or not or want it or not.”
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Lisa Cusack told Fox News Digital that uncertainty in early testing did not change the underlying biological reality, arguing that a woman was “either pregnant or not.” (Getty Images)
Barcohana said that element of the essay was relatable to women who have experienced pregnancy loss and blamed The New Yorker’s presentation for shifting attention away from it.
“The New Yorker’s editors betrayed the author with this provocative headline, because what she’s really talking about — in a vulnerable way that millions of women can empathize with — is the utility and impact on women of unreliable early testing,” she said. “She tried to talk about something totally legitimate for women trying to start a family, and they [editors] hijacked it.”
Fox News Digital reached out to The New Yorker for comment but did not immediately receive a response.
The distinction between detecting pregnancy and determining whether it is viable is also reflected in medical guidance. The Food and Drug Administration says at-home pregnancy tests detect human chorionic gonadotropin, or hCG, a hormone produced after a fertilized egg is attached to the uterine wall. The agency notes that testing too early can produce inaccurate results and that a positive home test does not provide information about how a pregnancy will develop.
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The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists states that pregnancy begins when a fertilized egg is implanted in the uterus, while pregnancy viability can require additional evaluation as development progresses.