Body image and pregnancy

According to Skouteris (2012: 664), citing a survey of the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, ‘body image concerns are largely ignored by physicians working with pregnant women’. However, such concerns do attract attention in the public sphere. Docx (2014) quotes Germaine Greer on the Duchess of Cambridge's second pregnancy: ‘The girl is too thin… she is vomiting her guts up and shouldn't have been made to go through all this again so soon.’ Meanwhile, some with an interest in Kim Kardashian's second pregnancy judged the celebrity too fat (King, 2015).

Yet some health professionals seem reluctant to engage with the topic of body dissatisfaction in pregnancy, which Skouteris (2012: 664) states is associated with depression, anxiety, low self-esteem and ‘unhealthy eating and extreme weight loss behaviours, which have serious negative implications for women's health and wellbeing and potentially also for the unborn fetus’.