Fake pregnant belly skin#

It is a silence, created by capitalism, convention and unconscious bias. In Britain we simply are not publicly familiar with what pregnancy, birth and newborns look like for women of colour. In every illustration in almost every single pregnancy and birth book, on every pregnancy test box, in all our tampon, nappy and breastpump adverts, on every online online advice column, at every NCT class and in every medical diagram, the woman and her baby we are exposed to is white. There are two parts to this strange phenomenon firstly, Meghan Markle is a woman of colour, secondly she is a member of the royal family. and 'Meghan Markle fake bump' is up 4400%. In fact, global searches for 'Meghan Markle fake pregnancy' are up 1650% in the last 90 days. In particularly dank and unpleasant corners of YouTube, Reddit and the like, anonymous strangers have built videos, threads and illustrated essays expanding on the crackpot theory that Meghan Markle is, in fact, not pregnant, but wearing a strap on rubber belly, has employed a surrogate, or is otherwise ‘faking’ it. So it was with a strange mix of horror, distaste, sympathy and fatigue that I learned of the ‘Meghan Moonbump’ theories circulating on the internet. I did three pregnancy tests, went for all the right scans and yet, until my tiny purple son pushed out into the bathing pool of an East London birth centre, there was still a part of me that wondered if I was having a baby at all. With a kind of uneasy thrill, I read about Queen Mary’s ‘phantom pregnancy’ of 1555 and wondered if I, too, had conjured this sickness, this thickening around the middle, this halt in my periods through hormonal changes, maternal longing and unchecked delusion alone. Being pregnant threw me into such deep whirlpools of anxiety that, more than once, I genuinely wondered if I was pregnant at all.

We’d never know’.īefore getting pregnant I was in the extremely lucky position of having no long-term or ongoing illnesses: physical or mental. As we walked out of my 12-week scan, shaking and lightheaded, I turned to my partner and said ‘But, you know, that whole screen could just be a video the same video they show to everyone. This is part of AP’s effort to address widely shared misinformation, including work with outside companies and organizations to add factual context to misleading content that is circulating online. “A situation where you might see such a distinct outline would be in a uterine rupture where the fetus is in the abdominal cavity and not the uterus itself (which is a life-threatening emergency),” Lincoln said. If the outline of a foot showed this clearly on a pregnant woman’s belly, it would indicate a serious problem, she said. Jennifer Lincoln, a board-certified OB-GYN in Portland, Oregon, also said the photo appeared fake. Baby is floating inside of the uterus until delivery and the uterine wall is thick.”ĭr. “If you saw that much definition of the foot, then the uterus would have ruptured. Laura Riley, chair of the department of obstetrics and gynecology at Weill Cornell Medicine.

Fake pregnant belly skin#

Medical experts say that while a baby’s movements are often visible from the outside near the end of pregnancy, its limbs do not show in detail because they are underneath several layers of skin and uterine wall. Manipulated versions of the image with the foot on the right side of her abdomen also have spread on social media in recent years.īut the image, which has circulated online for at least 18 years, is not real. The image shows the foot on the woman’s left abdomen. “The most beautiful picture,” read a caption with the image shared widely on Facebook.

THE FACTS: A striking image circulating on social media this week purports to show a fetus pressing from inside a pregnant woman’s abdomen, a detailed outline of its foot and toes visible on her skin. While it is possible to see the bulge of a fetus’ limbs as it moves in its mother late in pregnancy, doctors say details of a foot would not be visible because it would be inside the uterine wall. CLAIM: Image shows a detailed outline of a fetus’ foot pressing from inside a pregnant woman.ĪP’S ASSESSMENT: False.