Pregnancy is a sensitive issue for women generally, regardless of whether they have fertility issues or not.
For most women, becoming pregnant and a mother will be one of the biggest events in their lives.....usually a source of great joy and excitement, plus a range of other feelings too such as possibly fear. Women know not everyone finds becoming pregnant easy or that pregnancy is not always welcome. They know it can spark jealousy and deep sorrow.
And despite knowing how deeply the idea of pregnancy or its reality impacts women, so many lack basic empathy when talking about it with other women. So many women carelessly announce pregnancy without considering the range of emotions it evokes. So many make flippant comments about their becoming pregnant having been easy or unplanned, or make throwaway comments about it being the friends turn next.
Yes, people have to live their lives and pregnancies and should be able to talk about them and enjoy this phase in their life...absolutely...but greater appreciation of how it makes other people feel is needed often....just some simple empathy.
In the end, it’s all about knowing your audience and tailoring your conversation to them. And if you aren’t sure about your audience (a group of women containing women you don’t know well, may include women with all kinds of fertility issues you know nothing of) then err on the side of caution. Be less exuberant, less detailed, more interested in others than talking about oneself. Save the detailed discussion of pregnancy symptoms and poring over the minutiae for a particular group of other pregnant women. Be really considerate, quite simply.
And the thing that makes all of this quite tricky, as comes out in many posts here, are that friends move in and out of different groups. You have to recognise that and adjust the way you speak. The group of women hoping to all get pregnant finds some do become pregnant and the way they speak together just needs to change a bit. The group of people who are all pregnant together finds someone loses her pregnancy and is no longer one of the ‘club’ and the conversations when she is there need to change a bit too. People move in and out of the intense feelings associated with being pregnant and wanting to be pregnant.
Sometimes, people have lots of associations of convenience rather than real friendships. Pregnant women find each other and those undergoing fertility treatment find each other too and find things in common. But sometimes Omce those things in common stop, there isn’t much left to the friendship. That can be fine. But equally, being able to have good friends at different stages can also be fine too.....you just have to be a bit flexible too and adjust the amount of time you spend with them and the topics of conversation. Lots of people find this difficult. They only seem to be able to talk about themselves and their own phase of life....it can be getting married, or being pregnant, or having a toddler, or retiring...all potentially tedious for someone not at that stage of life, or extremely insensitive at worse.
All we can each do is to try to be good friends to those around us and to empathise. We won’t always get it right, but thinking about how others might be feeling and having more thought about that rather than ourselves must be a good starting point.