Fat or thin, another important consideration for society is whether you are providing the perfect vessel to carry this unborn child. It’s hard enough keeping up with the government’s changing recommendations on what you should and shouldn’t eat without your colleagues, family or the woman on the number 19 bus becoming gatekeepers of your diet and alcohol consumption. I’ve been told I’m a ‘cowboy’ for eating prawns while pregnant and glared at when I ordered a prosecco at a restaurant.

“I had one beer when I was pregnant with my first son and a woman said ‘Look at the state of her – isn’t it illegal to drink while you’re like that’. I felt like a bad mother before he was even born,” a colleague told me. Stylist’s celebrity editor faced similar judgment: “My female gym instructor took a strong objection to me using the treadmill – even though my doctor had told me it was safe to do so as I ran regularly before my pregnancy.”

There’s also very personal questioning. One friend who is also seven months pregnant has been asked: “Was it planned?” “How old are you?” “When will you get married then?“ “When will you go back to work?“ And, “How long were you trying?” by complete strangers. The office can be particularly rife with scrutiny. People openly ask me how long I’ll be taking for maternity leave and have passed judgment on my desire to come back to work (“You’ll change your mind once you meet your baby”). Someone actually kissed a colleague’s stomach at an office party, another was kindly informed, “That’s your career down the pan,” when she announced she was pregnant at 27.

No sooner has the bump scrutiny finished, the post baby body analysis begins. “I’ve been amazed at how much my body has been scrutinised,” one Stylist reader admitted. “People actually scan you up and down (mostly men I find) and say something inappropriate like, ‘Wow, where did the baby weight go?’ Unless you’re a good friend I don’t care what your opinion of my body shape is. And more importantly STOP LOOKING!”

“The pressure to lose your baby weight quickly is huge and that is undoubtedly due to ‘yummy mummy’ culture and celebrity mums not only exercising throughout but then stepping out with their ‘perfect’ bodies a few weeks after giving birth,” says psychologist Emma Kenny. “Women feel pressure to conform to pictures of the likes of Jessica Alba, and losing weight straight after having a baby is now almost expected. But it is such a negative way of thinking and it is essential we start being realistic as opposed to aspirationally irrational with our image.”

The other side

The scrutiny by no means stops when you don’t have a bump. The second you reach a certain age or a certain stage in your relationship, people turn into mini detectives and suddenly the most personal of choices become akin to a public soap opera.

“Got something to tell us?” one guest asked a friend on her wedding day when her groom innocently posed for a picture with a hand on her stomach. “You’ll be knocked up by Christmas,” said another, posthoneymoon. When my friend replied that oh no, she wouldn’t, they insisted that oh yes, she very much would be, like they were partaking in some form of twisted, gynaecological pantomime.

“You’ve lost weight. You have you know. Quite a bit,” another 35-year-old woman I know was told in alarmed tones by her in-laws on holiday as they scanned her bikini body for a sign of a grandchild. (This was followed up with the suggestion that people who don’t have children have “absolutely nothing to look forward to”. And a deflated “oh” when they were told of a long-haul holiday in November as they mentally totted up she’d still be able to fly and not flat on her back in stirrups.)

The bump watchers