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From crowded subway cars to hospital waiting rooms, society has made it clear that pregnancy is your problem, not theirs.
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By Genesis Aviles
A woman nine months pregnant is standing on a packed train, watching a man sit comfortably in a seat marked with a sign for pregnant women. She is not invisible. He simply does not care.
This is not a rare story anymore. It is a pattern, and honestly, it says everything about where we are as a society today.
Videos have flooded TikTok of pregnant women standing on trains, buses, and in waiting rooms while everyone around them stares at their phones or looks the other way. TikTok user Monamali posted a video showing exactly that: herself standing on a train while a man occupies a priority seat that has a sign on it specifically for pregnant women. Her caption read, “Say hello to our society.” She is right. This is our society now.
TikTok user Lizbeth Villa posted a similar video, recording herself standing in what appeared to be a waiting room, noting that no one offered her a seat. The comment section did not disappoint in its cruelty.
“No one owes you that idk,” “You were the one bussing it down, not me,” and “You’ll be okay girl lol.” Because apparently, the correct response to a pregnant woman standing in discomfort is mockery.
TikTok user Feli G shared that she was nine months pregnant and still had not been offered a seat on the Metro-North. Same story, same comments, same complete absence of basic human decency. This is not just happening on TikTok.
According to People, a woman shared her experience on Mumsnet after going 40 weeks pregnant without being consistently offered a seat in public. She wrote that she started laughing it off around the five-month mark, joking about how pregnant someone has to be before people notice. By 40 weeks, she was not laughing anymore.
“I literally look like I’m shoplifting a melon here,” she said. And still, nothing.
She made one observation that stuck: “The only chance of being offered a seat is if there’s a woman sitting who has been pregnant herself. If it’s all young people or men, you can forget it.”
One commenter on her post added that she had been standing in a maternity triage waiting room. A maternity triage waiting room, and three men looked up at her and pretended not to notice. Her husband had to angrily intervene.
Let that sink in. The one place on earth where offering a pregnant woman a seat should be the default, and grown men were still performing selective blindness.
Here is the thing that gets me. The people defending this behavior are not staying quiet about it. They are loud.
They are online and they are confident. The argument seems to boil down to: she chose to get pregnant, therefore she chose whatever discomfort follows.
As if pregnancy is a punishment to be endured alone. As if the rest of us have no role to play in how we treat each other in shared public spaces.
This shouldn’t even be a debate. Nobody came into this world without a woman carrying them. That is not a metaphor or a sentiment; that is just biology.
Yet somehow, we have arrived at a place where publicly shaming a pregnant woman for wanting to sit down is considered a reasonable point of view.
What happened to chivalry? To basic courtesy? Some will say it is an outdated concept, and maybe the word itself is.
Taking care of people who are more vulnerable than you in a moment is not an old-fashioned idea. We just stopped caring, because we live in a world where women are expected to make more babies while they are not provided with the comfort it requires.
One commenter in the Mumsnet thread offered a practical suggestion: just ask. “A polite ‘sorry to disturb, may I have a seat please?’ should be fine,” they wrote.
Sure, in a perfect world, that works. But the fact that a 40-week-pregnant woman is being advised to break through her own discomfort and ask strangers for a seat rather than those strangers simply offering one reveals exactly how far we have fallen as a society and how big the lack of a sense of community is growing in our hearts.
Pregnancy is not something to be ashamed of. It is, in fact, the reason why we all live under the same sun and go about our days breathing the same air. Everyone’s parents had sex, and a woman had to carry the result of that.
Yet she is the one being shamed for it by many people typing cruel comments from their couch. The least we can do for someone nourishing a new life is give her a place to sit down.