Pregnancy envy and infertility: the emotion nobody wants to admit

One of the emotions many women experience during infertility, but often feel deeply ashamed to admit, is pregnancy envy.

It can be triggered by a pregnancy announcement from a friend, a positive pregnancy test shared on social media, or simply seeing someone visibly pregnant. These moments can bring an immediate wave of emotion that feels difficult to understand and even harder to talk about.

Because alongside the envy often comes shame. You may find yourself thinking, What kind of person feels like this?

Pregnancy announcements become something entirely different

When you're longing for a baby, another person's pregnancy isn't simply somebody else's good news. Their news becomes filtered through your own grief, longing, repeated disappointment and the uncertainty of not knowing whether you will ever have the family you hoped for.

Instead of simply hearing that someone else is pregnant, you can find yourself confronted with everything you are longing for, everything you have already been through and everything you fear may never happen for you.

This is why a pregnancy announcement can provoke such a powerful emotional reaction. It isn't really about the other person's pregnancy. It's about what their pregnancy brings you face-to-face with in your own life.

It's not always as simple as "I'm happy for them but sad for me"

We often hear that it's possible to be happy for someone else while also feeling sad for yourself. Sometimes that is true. But during infertility, the emotional reality can be more complicated.

Sometimes your first response isn't happiness at all. It might be anger, resentment, disbelief or an overwhelming sense that life is deeply unfair. You might find yourself thinking, "Why them and not me?" or struggling to hear someone complain about a pregnancy you would give almost anything to experience.

These reactions can feel particularly distressing because they may clash with the person you believe yourself to be. You may genuinely love the person who is pregnant. You don't want them to experience infertility, yet you may still find their news incredibly painful.

Your immediate emotional response isn't necessarily a reflection of how you feel about them. It is often a reaction to your own grief and everything their pregnancy has come to represent.

Pregnancy envy is often grief in disguise

Pregnancy envy isn't usually about wanting somebody else to lose what they have. It is about desperately wanting what you don't have, what you may already have lost, or what you fear you may never have. 

At its heart, pregnancy envy is often another expression of grief.

Infertility can involve repeated and often invisible losses: unsuccessful treatment, embryos that don't develop or implant, miscarriages, months and years passing, and the loss of the assumption that becoming a parent would happen when you wanted it to. Another person's pregnancy can bring all of this grief suddenly to the surface.

Understanding pregnancy envy in this way can help you respond to yourself with compassion rather than judgement. Feeling envy doesn't make you selfish, cruel or a bad friend. It can be an understandable emotional response to living with prolonged uncertainty, longing and loss.

Why these feelings can be so difficult to admit

The shame surrounding pregnancy envy can sometimes become almost as painful as the envy itself. You may feel you are supposed to respond enthusiastically to pregnancy announcements, scan photographs, baby showers and newborn babies, regardless of what is happening in your own life.

So you congratulate people. You ask questions. You smile at photographs. You may attend celebrations that you know will be painful because you don't want to take anything away from someone else's happiness.

But constantly containing your own emotional reactions can be exhausting. You might find yourself carefully monitoring what you say, hiding tears until you are alone or automatically telling people you're fine when you're anything but.

You don't have to judge yourself for finding this hard

One of the difficulties of infertility is that it can bring out feelings you may never have experienced so intensely before.

You can love your friends and find their pregnancies painful. You can wish someone well and need some distance from them. You can be the person you have always believed yourself to be and still experience anger, envy, resentment or grief. 

These things can exist alongside each other.

How therapy can help

Having somewhere you can talk honestly about these feelings without worrying about being judged or misunderstood can be incredibly valuable. Therapy can offer a space where you don't have to say you're fine, minimise what you're feeling or censor the thoughts that feel too difficult or shameful to admit elsewhere.

This is also why working with a therapist who specialises in IVF and infertility, and who has personal experience of these issues, can be particularly helpful. When you're talking about feelings you may already be judging yourself for having, knowing that the person you're speaking to understands something of this experience from the inside can make it easier to be completely honest.