Henrietta Hay's Column

At long last - "pregnancy" is not a dirty word.

I'm not sure at what point in the development of civilization pregnancy became shameful and something to be hidden, but certainly Queen Victoria gets a lot of the credit for it. The Victorian era was in its last throes when I was a kid but the news hadn't filtered down to Englewood. I remember when I was nine or ten a neighbor boy stayed at our house overnight. His mother was sick, so we were told. He and I were completely dumbfounded the next day to find that he had a baby brother. We never did figure out what disease she had.

Modern kids will find this hard to believe, but I was probably in junior high before I ever heard the word "pregnant." Being a curious kid, I'm sure I looked it up in the dictionary, but that was no help. My friends and I, however, figured out very quickly that we should not use the word, that there was something secret and probably bad about it.

Today's kids have a break. They know when they are going to have siblings and have time to prepare for them. They know a lot of other things too, but that's another story.

Television has played a large part in this change. I have talked to several baby boomers who tell me that their introduction to the whole process of childbirth came from "I love Lucy." This was a real groundbreaker, since before that nobody on TV had ever been allowed to be pregnant. Women could present their families with babies but nobody ever knew where they got them. Lucy Ricardo was the first TV character to admit being pregnant, and the whole country followed her progress with enthusiasm. You probably remember the episode, often repeated, in which Ricky, Fred and Ethel practiced down to the second the routine of getting her to the hospital. But when the time came, they all went completely bonkers and left her standing in the middle of the living room holding the bag.

While TV helped open up the subject, it also gave a highly distorted view of childbirth. In fact, the baby boomers probably grew up thinking that half the population is born in the back seat of a speeding car and the other half in a stalled elevator. They also learned from TV that all women scream and carry on excessively, and that all fathers turn into bubbleheads. Considering that introduction, I think the generation has turned out very well.

Television newswomen have made a lot of headlines on the baby circuit. Jane Pauley and Joan Lunden had fairly public but discreet pregnancies. Most of the time on the air they were sitting down. Connie Chung created quite a stir when, at forty-four, she told CBS she wanted off the fast track in an effort to become pregnant. She had enough clout to get away with it, too. She'll be back. Meredith Viera was not so lucky. She ended up getting bounced off "60 Minutes" because she wanted time off for. Horrors, a second baby. We have watched, with a minimum of public outcry, the very public pregnancies of Deborah Norville, formerly of the Today Show, Katie Couric who took her place, and Maria Shriver.

And then, of course, we have the final step in the evolution of public childbirth, with the case of Demi Moore. Surely there is no one in America who has not seen a copy of last month's cover of Vanity Fair. There is disagreement about this picture of a naked, pregnant Demi, but the opinions I have heard range from shocking, to OK, to "a very beautiful photograph." By no definition that I have ever seen or heard of could it be called pornographic. This is not to say that most of us would ever, in a million years, do the same thing. Or would we? For a million bucks and an airbrush, who knows?

As usual, Erma Bombeck came up with the best explanation. She says, "This is Demi Moore's second child. Translated, that means modesty is no longer a word in her vocabulary."

We've gone from Queen Victoria to Demi Moore in a hundred years and "pregnancy" is no longer a dirty word. I for one think it's about time.