Madonna makes it look very easy. Catherine Zeta-Jones is still attending premieres and gala openings with barely a hair out of place, Kate Winslet has yet to stop giggling and, God help us all, Zoe Ball is only beginning.Everywhere we look, there's a famous face preceded by a bulging stomach. They come in all shapes and sizes but have remarkably similar guises: either tightly swathed in Lycra or nakedly exposed beneath crop tops, a style proudly sported last week by Madonna in defiance of society's attempt to dragoon men and women into regarding lean, washboard stomachs as the sole model of feminine beauty.
Demi Moore was the first to sexualise pregnancy with That Photo on the cover of Vanity Fair nine years ago but it needed the recent flood of older, richer and more confident women to drive a stake through the heart of the desexed and disempowered, pastelled and pretty, Laura Ashley mum-to-be.
Cherie Blair gave pregnancy back its sophistication, Cindy Crawford gave it glamour, while Madonna continues to defy stereotype by reducing the size of her T-shirts in inverse proportion to the swell of her stomach.
'It's amazing,' said Marina Warner, author and historian. 'For the first time since the early nineteenth century, women are able to take physical pride in their pregnancy. After remaining stuck in the prurience of the nineteenth century for 200 years, this seems to have happened almost overnight.'
In the eighteenth century, there was a robustness to the way in which the female body was portrayed. Artists displayed voluptuous female nakedness, bodily excess and fleshy enjoyment. Pregnancy was depicted as a sensuous condition, endorsing women's power in perpetuating the human race.
But as Classicism gave way to Romanticism, such lush enjoyment faded. As industrialisation sucked the masses from the countryside into the cities, an anxiety over the population boom developed and the desire to control women's reproduction took form in antipathy towards the pregnant body and prurience towards its depiction.
'The slim, female silhouette became desired when the value of pregnancy began to be denied,' said Warner.
This antipathy continued throughout the twentieth century: pregnant women may no longer have been required to relieve society of their presence by retreating into elegant confinement but they were expected to hide the proof of their recent shame and encroaching un-ladylike pain under billowing smocks and sack-like dungarees.
'It seems to me that society has so many double standards about motherhood,' said Kathy Lette, author of Foetal Attraction and Mad Cows, who took delight in wearing skin-tight lame jumpsuits and micro stretch minis during her last pregnancy seven years ago. 'Women are still perceived to have failed in some way if they don't produce progeny and yet when I was pregnant, society suddenly handed me an eviction notice.
'Twenty points were instantly deducted from my IQ and maternity shops tried to force me to dress like a little girl in pinks and pastels, frills and florals and pussy bows,' she added. 'Refusing to conform was my way of refusing to be just a life support system to a womb for nine months.'
Attitudes have been turned upside down since Lette's pregnancy. 'Europe's attitude towards the pregnant form has been revolutionised in the past couple of years,' said Warner. 'The moment the fertility rates began plummeting and the age of women giving birth began to rise, fertility became a precious commodity which was praised and treasured.'
The fertility fright is more than justified: from baby boom, we've come full circle back around to birth death. Fewer babies were born in Europe last year than at any time since the Second World War, while one in six British couples now experiences fertility problems.
Government predictions show the British population will peak and begin to decrease by 2036. 'The nightmare scenario of the human race waking one morning and realising it cannot reproduce is not scaremongering,' said Dr Simon Fishel, director of the Centre for Assisted Reproduction. 'If we carry on like this, it will be a reality.'
Stress, pollution and an increase in sexually transmitted diseases have been blamed for the fall in fertility: the number of couples seeking treatment for conception problems has risen by 55 per cent over five years - while more women decide not to become mothers.
'It's wonderful to see these women enjoying their pregnancies so wholeheartedly,' said author and columnist Nigella Lawson. 'Madonna wears common-or-garden combat trousers and Catherine Zeta-Jones was photographed wearing a perfectly ordinary black, Lycra dress. There are no idealised images here, just a healthy enjoyment in the state itself.
'But, despite the freeing at the top of the pile, normal people are still expected to conform to a more suitable mode of pregnancy,' said Lawson. 'Many men still find it difficult to talk to a pregnant woman with anything other than an almost overpowering condescension, and even some women assume you've suddenly become a baby carrier devoid of intelligence.'
amelia.hill@observer.co.uk
Observer Business Editor Emily Bell is pregnant, too - but she's more worried about stretchmarks than stretch Lycra
The pregnant stomach might be more fashionable this summer than Versace shades, but it is hardly an exclusive accessory.
True, Catherine Zeta-Jones, Madonna and Kate Winslet are all sporting the bow front, while Melinda Messenger, Cherie Booth and Emma Noble have acquired the full-blown baby accessory. But around 800,000 women will share the experience this year, including 14-year-old girls, first time mothers aged 45 and the rest of us in the profoundly moving but essentially untrendy middle ground of maternity.
More pregnant than Madonna, less than Zeta-Jones, I was surprised to be asked my views on the displays of collective pregnancy in last week's tabloids. It is good that women can now wear tight T-shirts and hipster trews while pregnant, as opposed to swathing themselves in a concealing smock/shirt - or, as books 50 years ago advised, only taking marital walks after dark to avoid embarrassment. But the excitement of unwittingly being caught on the breast of a fashion wave leaves me cold.
Clad in something stretchy from Marks & Spencer and an old shirt, I'm more excited by the prospect that if I sit still for long enough, a Japanese bank might buy me and open me as a tourist attraction.
Celebrity pregnancy has enabled (in the main) male editors to celebrate the acceptability of being pregnant and proud by filling their pages with colour shots of glamorous, confident women displaying and dressing their extending midriffs. It is an essentially male take on what should constitute appreciation of this glorious state, as long as it stops there.
What pregnant women really want to know about other pregnant women, famous or not, is the litany of grisly statistics that the tabloids don't want to print. Madonna's admission of dreadful stretchmarks and Messenger's pre-eclampsia nightmare (dangerously high blood pressure, protein in your urine and fingers swollen like sausages), were far more gripping for me than whether they could still fit into their bikinis.
Messenger's bad experience is shared by one in 10 first-time mothers. It is comforting to find that celebrity skin is no different. Whether Catherine Zeta-Jones has piles or varicose veins might be classified as too much information, but women producing a child are voracious for the various weights and states which make up nine months' hard labour.
These, not Maharishi trousers, are the real shared experience of every woman in pregnancy. But don't expect to see that on the front page of the Sun.
