References

Brown A, Rance J, Warren L Body image concerns during pregnancy are associated with a shorter breast feeding duration. Midwifery. 2015; 31:(1)80-9 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.midw.2014.06.003

The Duchess of Cambridge: How Britain stopped believing in the royal fairytale. 2014. http://tinyurl.com/oaynurz (accessed 15 December 2015)

Hopper KM, Aubrey JS Bodies after babies: the impact of depictions of recently post-partum celebrities on non-pregnant women's body image. Sex Roles. 2015; https://doi.org/10.1007/s11199-015-0561-2

Kim Kardashian: see how she shuts down a pregnant body shamer – yay. 2015. http://tinyurl.com/pbobeoo (accessed 15 December 2015)

Matarasso A, Smith DM Strategies for aesthetic reshaping of the postpartum patient. Plast Reconstr Surg. 2015; 136:(2)245-57 https://doi.org/10.1097/PRS.0000000000001410

Shloim N, Hetherington MM, Rudolf M, Feltbower RG Relationship between body mass index and women's body image, self-esteem and eating behaviours in pregnancy: a cross-cultural study. J Health Psychol. 2015; 20:(4)413-26

Skouteris H Pregnancy: physical and body image changes. In: Cash TF London: Elsevier; 2012

Body image and pregnancy

02 January 2016
Comment
02 January 2016
Volume 24 · Issue 1

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’.

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