ABSTRACT
In the preceding chapters we have explored how women may or may not change their behaviour during pregnancy. In some cases the changes are founded on information from research. The need to take action in accordance with advice can be seen as reasonable. However, it has been our contention that this message to change behaviour re¯ects a number of assumptions about women's behaviour, their role as mothers and their responsibility to others. We would argue that this apparently reasonable set of requirements actually subjects women to a degree of oversight that could be described as a form of surveillance. In many ways this is integral to much of women's experience inasmuch as their appearance and behaviour are frequently subject to public scrutiny and criticism. This is particularly the case for women who are, for one reason or another, in the public eye. In this chapter we look at the way that pregnancy has been represented in the media and we focus on the images and representations of pregnancy and the pregnancy of public ®gures, in order to examine how the public sanctioning of behaviour is enacted.
