Pregnancy is a body horror

Every few months or so someone on the internet will go viral for saying that pregnancy is the worst thing a woman could ever do to their bodies. The cycle has finally come around, and a new post has made the rounds:

lavandula 🧚@faerieofthebog

your entire body changes, your teeth fall out, you hair falls out, your brain LITERALLY SHRINKS, and don’t even get me started on how the belly looks. calling pregnancy body horror is an accurate statement. https://t.co/UHXAF9LGQZ

3:46 PM · Jul 25, 2026 · 1.86M Views

13 Replies · 672 Reposts · 5.25K Likes

If you do not know body horror is a genre of horror film that usually focuses on graphic transformations, violations, the breaking, and the decay of the physical body. To include things such as grotesque mutations, parasitism, disease, and the loss of control of the body. Pretty unpleasant stuff if you ask me, but I thought it well to include what people mean by this so that you might have an understanding of what horrific stuff they are comparing the body of a pregnant woman to.

I am not going to waste your time or mine even going over how some of the claims in the post are just silly and made up, but one thing is true in all of this, your body does change, it changes quite a bit, I know mine has, but so what?

What is so wrong with looking like you are a mom?

I have been pregnant five times, I only have three living children but pregnancy nonetheless has changed my body every one of those times. My stomach is far softer, my hips have become wider, my back feels much weaker than what it used to be, I have stretch marks in places I never had before, many parts of my body are completely different than before I had a child. But the problem with associating body horror with pregnancy is that it includes things that are not natural at all. Everyone knows it is not natural or normal to turn into a werewolf but everyone knows it is one of the most normal things in the world to have your body change with pregnancy.

Our bodies tell our stories, and there is nothing more life changing than the live’s we bring forth with our own, so how insulting it is to have our life completely change and yet demand our bodies remain the same? We have constructed this new idea that the ideal body is one that does not have any history. Our bodies must not show that we have carried children, that we have gained weight, aged, or lived. We for some reason expect it to remain untouched by life, now the greatest thing a woman could ever accomplish is to preserve her body in the same exact condition it was in when she was twenty.

But to live is to be changed.

Living does a lot of damage. It is one hundred percent lethal unfortunately. We get wrinkles, we get looser skin, our hair grays out and it gets much thinner. We stop seeing as well as we used to, our knees hurt, and sleeping wrong takes weeks to recover from. Living gives us scars too, we get lines on our faces from all the expressions we have felt and carried, the laughs, the tears, the many nights awake. Eventually time will alter every single inch of us, whether we have children or not, and whether we want to or not.

So what is the alternative here exactly? Should we just never run again? Should we not laugh? Should we not stand in the sun? Should we refuse to ever love again for the fear of how grief might change our bodies? Should we live only until life has done us any damage? Should we aim to die before we might be changed, transformed, morphed? We have it all wrong, a body that is without change is not the evidence of a life that was lived well, instead it is evidence of no life lived at all. It is a tragedy to die young with a body unchanged, untouched, unlived, it is not a tragedy to die old with a skin marked by years of life, of struggle, of joy, of hope, of love, of an entire unique human story.

My goal is not to come here and say that every consequence of pregnancy is pleasant and should just be accepted. Or that we cannot do our best to avoid certain changes, and consequences. It is true that some women do suffer terrible things, but there is a huge difference between accepting and understanding that pregnancy can be difficult and describing the normal changes of motherhood on a body as something grotesque straight out of a horrific horror movie. Pregnancy is not this alien invasion unnatural occurrence of the body, it is one of the greatest things we are capable of, when we women become pregnant our bodies are not malfunctioning, and they for sure are not mutating or decaying. It is doing very much the opposite, it is doing an incredibly complex, difficult and deeply important task. The problem in all of this is that we do not accept the changes that happen to the female body. The goal of every pregnant woman is to come out the other side completely unchanged, this was me as well, I wanted to grow all of my children, all of their bodies, I wanted my body to protect, nurture them for nine months, feed them, grow them, I wanted to give birth to an entire new human being that had never existed before and never will exist again, the greatest love I have ever experienced, I wanted to do all of this, and I wanted to come out the other side completely the same. How absolutely ridiculous.

The more I have thought about this the more I think that the major contributing factor to this new ideal is that we live in a world now where there is not a meaningful, purposeful place for older people. Growing old and changed is something we want to avoid at every cost, we know young women are meant to be beautiful, desirable, full of life and untouched by the cruel touch of life, but what exactly is she, what are we, supposed to become after? We do not really know.

Growing old used to mean we became an elder, an old woman who was wise, comforting yet truthful, someone who had lived and had the skin in the game to show it. People like this were trusted and very much needed. Women would eventually become mothers, and then a grandmother, eventually a sort of family matriarch, someone who was the keeper of stories, of the family memories, the source of many wisdom, instruction, and of good counsel. Age obviously comes with losses, but it also used to come with authority, a place, a throne of some kind, a legacy, and a purpose. Now as soon as children are grown I feel like many of us women are pressured into “getting after it”, get fit, get in shape, get thin, get the injection, get lipo, get the mommy makeover, lose the weight, get hot again, look young again, but whatever you do, just do not let yourself be seen as a woman who has been changed by life.

Nobody wants to grow old anymore, everyone is terrified of getting there, and of course we are, because there is no job there, there is no purpose, once we stop being beautiful and young, well what use are we now? If our greatest value as women is our youth, our beauty, our bodies, then of course pregnancy, aging and changing is terrifying, of course motherhood is of great cost if this is indeed the currency we are using, of course a stretch mark is not longer just a stretch mark, it is instead proof, evidence, that our bodies have gone from maidenhood into motherhood, from untouched into changed, from high value to low value.

But friends, motherhood is not a failure to preserving maidenhood, a mother is not a maiden who has become ruined, she is just a woman with a different role, a different purpose, a different body who has born witness to a life altering event, the mistake we make is not in saying that pregnancy changes us, it does, yes, it will change you, but our mistake is instead in believing that every change is some sort of loss.

My children will one day look at my body and see it as the first home they ever had, and I refuse to spend the rest of my entire life mourning the fact that loving them left evidence.

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