名人怀孕要不要公之于众 媒体是否该代替人做决定

News spread quickly through the literary world: Nigerian novelist Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, winner of a 2008 MacArthur “genius” grant, had given birth to a baby girl. But the growing public attention didn’t focus on the fact of the birth – that was material better left to the *tabloids – but on the manner in which the announcement was given. Adichie, in fact, hadn’t actually announced it at all.

近来，一个消息在文学界传开了：尼日利亚小说家、2008年麦克阿瑟天才奖获得者奇麻曼达•阿迪契生了个女孩儿。然而，公众的关注点并不在她产女的消息上——这种事或许小报才关心——而是她如何公开这个消息。事实上，阿迪契从未真正公开过这个消息。

Instead, she casually let it slip during an interview with the Financial Times’ David Pilling, over a lunch of *jollof rice, curry and steamed greens. As Pilling recounts in an article published late last month, Adichie ordered a non-alcoholic cocktail, offering a simple explanation: “I’m *breastfeeding.”

阿迪契只是在接受《金融时报》记者大卫•帕琳采访时才轻描淡写地提到，他们当时正在一起享用辣椒炖鱼肉饭、咖喱蒸蔬菜的午餐。在上月末发表的一篇文章中，帕琳描述道，阿迪契点了一杯无酒精的鸡尾酒，随口解释道：“我正在哺乳期。”

Pilling writes he took a moment to process the *revelation, before inquiring further. This spurred Adichie to explain why she chose to keep quiet. “I just feel like we live in an age when women are supposed to perform pregnancy. We don’t expect fathers to perform fatherhood,” she said. “I wanted it to be as personal as possible.”

帕琳在文章中称，在进一步询问前，他花了些时间来消化这句话。这也促使阿迪契说明自己选择沉默的原因。“我只是觉得，我们生活在一个要求女性将怀孕公开的时代。然而父亲们却不必亮出自己为人父的身份，”她说到。“我想让怀孕变得尽可能地私人化。”

The conversation doesn’t go much further, but her words raise the question of what it means to be pregnant today, in our hyper-connected society. Pregnant women have always born the weight of societal expectations – only now, one of those burdens has to do with the *spectacle of pregnancy.

这场对话并没有进行太久，但是她的话却让人想到了一个问题：在如今这个信息高效传递的社会中，怀孕究竟意味着什么？怀孕的女性总是承受着社会的期待——而在今天，这些负担还和怀孕的公开有关。

It’s hard to hide a growing belly, especially after four to five months or so, but now more than ever, a *fetus’s development has become a public event. Social media serves as a *catalogue for users’ life changes, and if mood swings and wardrobe updates qualify, pregnancy certainly fits the bill. To withhold such information would be treated as a betrayal by the social media audience, which has come to expect a degree of intimacy from the medium.

我们很难藏住一个日渐隆起的腹部，尤其在四五个月后，但现在，胎儿的发育和以往任何时候相比，都成为了一个更为公开的事情。社交媒体就像是记录用户生活变化的一览表，如果情绪波动和衣柜更新都属于这个范畴，那么怀孕自然也不例外。对这些信息有所保留，将会被社交媒体的围观者们视为一种背叛。因为大家都希望能借此增加亲密感。

The internet has shifted the very way we speak about pregnancy, just over the last decade and a half. Phrases like “baby *bump” and “bump watch” may be *ubiquitous online and in tabloids nowadays, but they were virtually nonexistent before the start of the new millennium.

在过去的十五年间，互联网改变了我们谈论怀孕的方式。类似于“婴儿凸”和“孕相观察”这种词汇或许在今天的网络和小报中十分普遍，而事实上，它们在新千年之前还并不存在。

Slate reporter Dvora Meyers traces “baby bump” back to 2002, when the tabloid Us Weekly started to use it to describe the midsections of pregnant celebrities. Jezebel’s Sadie Stein places the origins of “bump watch” not long after, in 2004, as the *paparazzi scanned the stomachs of celebrities for evidence of a developing child.

《Slate》杂志记者德沃拉•迈耶斯将“婴儿凸”这一说法追溯至2002年，当时小报《美国周刊》开始用这个词来形容怀孕名人的上腹部。Jezebel网站的莎蒂•施泰因认为“孕相观察”一词首次出现在不久后的2004年，当时狗仔队仔细观察名人们的腹部，并以此作为怀孕的证据。

With so much emphasis on women’s *midriffs, it’s little wonder that the pregnancy photos online have become a series of headless portraits, the camera laser-focused on the expanding belly in question. This style of photo can seem dehumanizing: The woman stands in profile to give her growing belly maximum effect, but her face is usually cut off at the top of the frame. The fetus is given symbolic importance, not the mother-to-be.

由于人们对女性上腹部如此关注，网上的孕照变成了一系列“无头肖像”也不足为奇，相机只关注人们热议的日益隆起的腹部。这样的照片似乎是缺乏人性的：女性侧身站在镜头前，她们隆起的腹部成为了最抢眼的部分，然而面部却往往被裁掉。胎儿被赋予了高度的象征意义，而准妈妈却被无视了。

Performing pregnancy continues well after the baby is born. An equally modern phenomenon is the concept of the “post-baby body”: New mothers must race to *shed their pregnancy fat after conceiving, to return to their so-called “real” weight. It’s just one more pressure to add to a slate now filled with the day-to-day care of a newborn, and it’s little wonder Adichie wanted no part of it.

怀孕消息公开这件事甚至在婴儿降生后还在继续。“孕后身材”也是个现代现象：新妈妈们必须快速地甩掉产后脂肪，回到所谓的“现实”体重。这是除了每天照顾新生儿以外的又一压力，也难怪阿迪契并不想公开怀孕生产的消息。