Hey where the pregnant women at?
Have you ever noticed how few pregnant people you find in TTRPGs? It's pretty weird, when you think about it. For most of history, women had a lot of kids - up to 7, sometimes even more! - and considering most women stopped having children in their 40's (or even their 30's, when exposed to conditions of hunger), that is a cool 1/3 of their fertile life spent involved in the process of pregnancy; double that if you include newborns, which you should.
Let's look at a historical example: Eleanor of Aquitaine.
Eleanor married twice, once at 13, and again at 28. From both her husbands she had 10 children, with the first being at age 21 and the last being at age 42; a prodigious feat! So for about half of her adult life, any time you met her, she would have been pregnant with some child or another.
Not all women mothered so many though, Cleopatra only had four children (albeit two were twins), the first at age 22 and the last at age 29. A modest number, but if we account for the newborn period, that's still an expressive portion of her life between ages 20 and 39 where she was involved in the process of pregnancy. Considering she killed herself at that age, it is fair to say her children were just as important a part of her life as Mark Anthony.
Why is that?
I think there are many reasons as to why people avoid the mention of pregnancy in their games, a couple of reasons being:
People just don't think about it. I think this is the main one. People just have less children nowadays and so you don't meet as many women involved in the process of pregnancy on their day-to-day lives, and therefore don't think about the fact that pregnancy was one of the major - if not THE major preoccupation in the lives of women. And I don't even mean the premodern past; this applies as far back as 70 years!
It's a subconscious reminder of sexual unavailability. I leave the Lacanian speculation to Marcia, but there is something to be said about how unmarried women (i.e. who aren't submitting themselves to a man) are often depicted in positions of sexual availability. Unavailability is thus reserved to the unsexed, like old women (who aren't often depicted either).
It's not adventurous. Pregnancy is conceived for many people (and for a very long time) as a form of disability, and disabled people are construed as opposed to adventuring, therefore pregnancy has no place in adventures.
It's scary and "too real". A lot of people are uncomfortable around babies and pregnant women, as living-breathing reminders of how fragile life can be, not to mention traumas one might have around such matters. Besides, a problem with pregnancy isn't a problem you can solve by chopping with a sword or shooting with a gun, which is far too complicated for many game-likers.
The hobby has been a boys' club since its inception and is only now beginning to shake off that stink. Pregnancy, being a feminine activity par excellence, is therefore off-limits; part of the mysterious world of aunties that don't even want to involve menfolk. A lane-staying attitude my sister beat out of me with her effusive interest in pregnancy when we were growing up (and a determination to protect me from finding menstruation gross).
There are likely more, but I think the point is made: people either don't think or don't want to think about pregnancy, much less in their elfgames of vanquishing mighty foes & delving deep and deleterious labyrinths.
The Case for Pregnancy
There are many brave characters in Tolstoy's novels, many of whom are soldiers or people who do the right thing under horrifying circumstances, we even meet Napoleon in War and Peace, but one character soars above all of them: Kitty, in Anna Karenina, when she goes into labour.
He knew and felt only that what was being accomplished was similar to what had been accomplished a year ago in a hotel in a provincial capital, on the deathbed of his brother Nikolai. But that had been grief and this was joy. But that grief and this joy were equally outside all ordinary circumstances of life, were like holes in this ordinary life, through which something higher showed. And just as painful, as tormenting in its coming, was what was now being accomplished; and just as inconceivably, in contemplating this higher thing, the soul rose to such heights as it had never known before, where reason was no longer able to overtake it.
I like that chapter a lot because it treats the process of birth like a funeral, and it seems apt to how people historically treated that process, even today. It's an occasion of much celebration, yes, but it's also the single most dangerous event most women who give birth will face in their entire lives. As anyone who's expected can attest, you become keenly aware that life and death are both a hair's breadth away during birth; so much can go wrong, an internal haemorrhage is very difficult to stop in the best of cases (and impossible in the worst of them), that I can't help but thinking it's an extremely heroic action.
As such, with every NPC that can get pregnant you have prepared, ask yourself: what would the situation be like if they were pregnant? Make them so. And if you must have a die chance, roll 2 in 6 for each NPC that could be pregnant right now (with a disadvantage if they're not married, or something).
It's a subtle reminder to everyone around the table that life goes on as normal within the houses and in the backdoors of reality. That despite all the killing and maiming, people are still having sex, giving birth, nursing their young, teaching, and reproducing life in its entirety somewhere out there. And if it isn't, then it's simply a more accurate and true depiction of the human experience as it has been since life began on this planet.
