Pregnancy Envy During Infertility: The Emotion Nobody Wants to Admit
By Saff Mitten
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 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 long for.
Rather than simply hearing that someone else is pregnant, you can find yourself confronted with everything you have lost, everything you fear, and everything that remains uncertain.
In that moment, it can feel deeply personal.
Not because you aren't happy for them, but because their pregnancy highlights your own pain in a way that can feel impossible to escape.
The reality is often more complicated than, "I'm happy for them but sad for me."
People often say that it's possible to feel happy for someone else whilst also feeling sad for yourself.
Sometimes that is true.
But for many women, the emotional reality is more complicated than that.
Sometimes the first emotional response isn't happiness at all. Sometimes it is anger, disbelief or the overwhelming sense that life is deeply unfair. Sometimes it is resentment, grief or the painful realisation that, once again, somebody else has what you have been desperately hoping for.
That can feel incredibly difficult to admit because it clashes so strongly with the person you believe yourself to be. You may genuinely care about the other person. You may not wish infertility on anyone. And yet, in that first painful moment, your emotional response may have very little to do with them. It is 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 have lost, or what you fear you may never have.
At its heart, pregnancy envy is often another expression of grief.
When we begin to understand it in that way, it becomes easier to respond to ourselves with compassion rather than judgement.
These feelings do not make you selfish, cruel or a bad friend.
They make you someone living through one of the most emotionally challenging experiences life can bring.
And yet, despite this, many women still find these feelings almost impossible to admit.
The emotional cost of pretending to be fine
For many women, the most difficult part isn't simply feeling pregnancy envy. It's feeling unable to admit it.
These emotions can feel so unacceptable and shameful that they are quickly pushed down. Rather than talking about them, we often keep them entirely to ourselves, worried about what other people might think if they knew what was really going through our minds.
Over time, this can create another emotional burden. It can feel as though you have to hide behind a mask of being fine. Perhaps there are one or two people in your life - a partner, close friend or family member - with whom you feel able to share some of what you're going through. But for many women, much of the outside world sees someone who appears to be coping.
Yet even with the people you trust most, some feelings can remain hidden. Pregnancy envy is often one of them, because the truth is you don't really want to admit it to yourself either.
Maintaining that mask takes energy. It means constantly monitoring your reactions, choosing your words carefully and making sure your own pain doesn't become visible to other people.
It can also mean putting yourself in situations that feel deeply painful. You attend baby showers, admire scan photos, hold new born babies and enthusiastically ask about them, all while trying to contain the grief, envy or heartbreak those moments may be stirring up inside you.
For many women, this isn't about pretending. It comes from a place of kindness. They don't want to take anything away from someone else's happiness or make another person feel guilty for becoming pregnant. They care deeply about the people in their lives and want to be there for them.
The hidden cost of keeping it all inside
Over time, the mask can become almost permanent. You find yourself saying, "I'm fine," even when you're anything but. It can feel easier to hide what you're really experiencing than to explain the complexity of what you're going through.
Without necessarily realising it, your own emotional needs can gradually slip into the background as so much of your energy goes into protecting other people from your pain. In many ways, you may find yourself putting other people's emotional wellbeing ahead of your own.
When you are navigating one of the hardest experiences of your life, maintaining that façade comes at a real cost. It takes an enormous amount of emotional energy to keep pretending to be fine, and this can leave you feeling depleted, exhausted and increasingly disconnected from yourself. If this continues for months or years, as infertility often does, carrying that emotional burden can eventually become too much.
If this article resonated with you…
I'm Saff Mitten, a specialist counsellor and psychotherapist supporting women through IVF, infertility and miscarriage.
Through both my therapeutic work and my writing, I explore the emotional and psychological impact of these experiences to help women make sense of feelings that can often be difficult to put into words and feel less alone.
If you're looking for support with your own experience of infertility, IVF or miscarriage, you can follow the link below to find out how I support women through these experiences. I work online and support women across the UK.