Who is being unreasonable? Baby shower at work

[CCEE8]

Girl at work is having a baby with her wife who is pregnant.

Colleague A is arranging a baby shower to celebrate.

Colleague B thinks a baby shower doesn’t make sense because the girl isn’t pregnant. We don’t organise baby showers for dads.

The pregnant wife doesn’t work for our company and wouldn’t be at the baby shower (it would take place in our office).

Who’s being unreasonable?
YANBU - Colleague A
YABU - Colleague B

Why would you organise a "baby shower" at work anyway? Just do a card and a gift, for mums and dads to be.

Also... well, everyone has their own struggles. It's also not mean-spirited to resent constantly forking out for other people when you're not supported because it's not something society deems worthy of support.

Agree. Over the last decade I’ve contributed hundreds (if not over a grand) to eleventy billion wedding and birth contributions and received absolutely nothing back because I didn’t do either of those things. That’s unlikely to change in the next decade (I’m infertile and have been single forever) so I’ve stopped contributing to collections unless the person is a friend.

There’s been a trend for work baby showers in the last couple of years (5 last year) and I hate them. I go to the office to work, not to endlessly celebrate pregnancy.

Baby showers at work are unnecessary. We sometimes have coffee and cake with someone who’s going on maternity leave but that’s it. It’s not fair to colleagues who may be struggling with fertility issues or miscarriage.

Your last sentence 😂nail on head.
As an aside I do think the age/sex composition of the team affects this a lot. I've worked in ones which were a revolving door of young people of marriageable/childbearing age. It does get a bit wearing when it's so constant! Of course, older people can get divorced and re-married too but that's not as common where I worked IME.

One team (all female) that I worked had half marry, get pregnant and go on mat leave in the same year. 3/6 people. Then over the next couple of years as they left/returned PT etc their replacements also did the same. Collections were never ending.

It's a bit more palatable when it's just one or two every couple of years.

Yes, it’s basically exactly that where I work! (except we don’t get mat cover, but the majority of women where I work have 2/3 kids close together so that’s where the revolving door effect kicks in.)

I don't get the shower thing (or wedding thing) at work. That's for friends only.

If they don't do it for dads as the non-pregnant person in the couple then why would they do it for a woman who was the non-pregnant person in the couple? It makes me wonder if it's some kind of back-patting exercise in showing how cool they all are with a same-sex relationship. It feels super patronising to me to treat a lesbian spouse differently from a straight spouse.