Introduction

Abstract

Feminist scholars have comprehensively examined why women suffer from body image woes (see Bartky, 1988; Bordo, 1993a; Wolf, 1990). On the surface, it seems strange to think that pregnant women fear ‘fat’. After all, pregnancy is a time when women are supposed to gain weight. In this book, I argue that in the midst of moral panics about maternal ‘obesity’ in the West, body image anxieties in pregnancy are more common than we think, and that there are host of reasons why pregnant women are becoming more fearful of ‘fat’.