Remember, women: if you're not pregnant, you're pre-pregnant, and you need to build your lifestyles around that fact

Telling women to change their lifestyles for the sake of others who may never exist seems ludicrously backwards

The article states, 'large numbers of young women smoke, drink too much alcohol' (getty images)

Pregnancy and childbirth – where would we be without them? Essential to the continuation of our very species, everyday phenomena don’t get more miraculous. It’s a pity they’re entrusted to such unworthy vessels.

Just look at the evidence: if the class of humans responsible for bringing forth new life aren’t too old, they’re too young. If they’re not too stressed, they’re too lazy. If they’re not getting distracted by book-learning, they’re leaving it too late to get themselves impregnated at all. If only this all-important job had been left to someone responsible (like, say, a man). Still, we are where we are, so might as well check the latest instalment of “what the pregnant – and potentially pregnant – are doing wrong”.

A headline in today’s Metro tells us that “British women are ‘woefully unprepared for pregnancy’ because they’re so unhealthy”. The article states, “large numbers of young women smoke, drink too much alcohol, are overweight or obese, and consume inadequate amounts of fruits and vegetables”. Meanwhile The Telegraph tells us that “women who are hoping to conceive should adopt a healthy diet years earlier”.

The Lancet study on which these news reports are based leads to some perfectly good recommendations: don’t drink too much coffee or alcohol; eat more fruit and vegetables; stop smoking; watch your weight. That how healthy you are before conception may have an impact on the pregnancy itself should not be surprising.

What is worrying is the way in which facts, separated from any broader analysis of the economic, social and political status of women, are put to the service of media narratives which reduce those who could get pregnant to incubators-in-waiting. Once again, the line between pregnancy as biological fact and pregnancy as morality tale becomes blurred.

The desire to control and manage pregnancy is laudable when considered in abstract terms. Of course we all want babies to be born healthy. Creating the perfect conditions for the growth of human life seems a brilliant idea.

The problem comes – here, as with debates over abortion – when we have to consider the fact that attached to the female reproductive system is a whole human being. A human being with her own hungers, desires, limitations and choices to make. A human being whose entire focus cannot be on making herself a worthy container for any potential new life.

What should concern us most about young women being “unhealthy” isn’t the potential impact on an as-yet unconceived child. It’s the actual impact on women. Yes, living, breathing humans will always seem more flawed and less deserving of concern than the unborn, those who have not yet had the opportunity to make bad choices. Even so, to tell women to change their lifestyles for the sake of others who may never exist seems ludicrously backwards (although I’m looking forward to the day when we start policing the habits of foetuses in order to protect the health of their future offspring, too. “Embryos which implant on the left side of the uterus ‘destroying the lives of their future grandchildren’, say scientists”).

So what’s to be done? Here’s one suggestion: we restructure the whole of society to stop the pre-pregnant being so rubbish. We set up education camps run by – I don’t know, let’s call them “aunts” – so that young, fertile women are fully prepared for what lies ahead. So that these women don’t slip up by popping into the nearest Wetherspoon’s or having a sneaky fag, we make them easily identifiable by giving them a uniform of sorts (red dresses, for example). That way, society as a whole can be fully in control of the means of reproduction.

On the other hand, we could value the health of all members of society at all stages of their life. We could make a healthy diet accessible to all and create clear distinctions between good advice and moral judgment. As both a formerly pregnant woman and an ex-womb inhabitant, I suggest we opt for the latter.