I’ll be the first guy to leave my seat for women (preggers or not) and the elderly (but watch out, there’s a non-trivial chance to get yelled at because “I’m not that old, asshole !” :)) - I was raised that way and I do it more or less unthinkingly by now. I’ll also hold doors for both men and women, and help people with their luggage up stairs (mostly because the clattering noise annoys me). I’m just that unbelievably awesomee.
However, anyone peremptorily demanding I do any of that ; or worse doing that passive-aggressive thing where you loudly tell your companion/husband/imaginary friend that people these days just have no manners in a flagrant obliviousness to irony ; yeah, those people trigger my fuckyou reflex something fierce. Politeness goes both ways.
I have a similarly fun anecdote, although it does not involve bodily fluids. I was on a fairly crowded bus middling-to-largely pregnant and with a toddler, and nobody offered me a seat. I moved back to where a woman had a backpack taking up one seat next to her and stood there hopefully, but she didn’t even offer to move the backpack, and then the bus started up. So with one hand on my kid I grabbed the strap with the other hand, and there was just no way I could keep my shoulder bag from banging the lady in the face, repeatedly. After the second time, she moved her backpack.
Why wouldn’t you ask her to move the backpack right away? That would seem to be a much more effective way of getting a seat and no one would get hit in the face. My experience on public transportation is that people are pretty damn clueless of what’s going on around them unless explicitly confronted with it.
I was on the train with my mother when I was pregnant. For those of you who don’t think pregnant women deserve special consideration on public transit, let me tell you that your center of gravity changes and it was hard to balance myself correctly sometimes. In The Cider House Rules, one of the characters talks about how he could tell a woman was pregnant just by how she walked, the care she took not to tip over.
I’m sure not every woman ever was like that, but for some of us, standing on a moving train is a serious accident waiting to happen.
So I boarded the train and all the seats were taken and I patted the belly and I was about to ask the nearest, healthiest looking person to please let me sit when my mother screamed “SHE’S PREGNANT. SOMEONE GIVE HER A SEAT.”
Blunt, not rude, IMHO. The guy is absorbed in his paperwork, after all.
But just having the pin doesn’t mean she’s pregnant. If I were the man, I’d look at the woman and if she were not visibly pregnant I’d say so and keep my seat; if she were visibly pregnant I’d give way immediately.
There’s no obvious signs of early-stage pregancy, and for bigger women even late-stage pregnancy may not be obvious. I’d give up my seat rather than take a chance that I was being a selfish git.
If they’re only a few weeks pregnant, so little that you can’t even tell, do they really have a condition that requires them to be sitting all the time?
Every now and then extreme social anxiety kicks in and I’m afraid to say two words to anyone. Also, the backpack was on the seat next to the window, and what I really wanted was for her to move over and put the backpack in her lap, rather than put the backpack in her lap and let me climb over the seat. (And she should have moved the backpack–other people were standing as well.) I would have gotten around to talking to her in another 30 seconds or so but then the bus took off.
Please note, I did not purposely hit her in the face with my bag. It was a shoulder bag, and when the bus took off and I grabbed for the strap so as not to go flying down the aisle, the shoulder bag also went with the momentum of the bus.
I didn’t show with my first until I was about 4.5 months or so. I assure you that I was experiencing some of the more uncomfortable side effects of pregnancy long before that point. Now, personally I was capable of standing on a train or bus for at least short trips, but not every pregnant woman is.
That’s a load a hooey. The tiny doctor I work with who’s maybe 95 pounds soaking wet and never wore maternity clothes other than her husband’s sweatshirts, wasn’t noticeably pregnant until she was 7 MONTHS along. Damn straight she still needed that seat long before she was “visibly pregnant” unless she tightened her shirt and stuck her belly in your face. I suppose she could have just puked on you.
I had hyperemesis with my second pregnancy; I lost 5 lbs in my first 4 months because of it. Yes, I needed that seat long before I was showing.
For my first pregnancy, I didn’t need any extra accommodation until the very end (8 months +) and wouldn’t have asked for the seat then.
Every pregnancy, even for the same woman, can be very different and it can be exhausting. There isn’t necessarily a need to “sit all the time” but pregnancy can be extremely tiring; sitting for the commute does not mean bed rest by any stretch of the imagination.
