This is a nutty opinion. There is no “cult of pregnancy”. It’s a difficult condition for many women; I would say for most women at least part of the time, and it isn’t always visible. It is also an incredibly common condition. There may be other people who are disabled and it isn’t visible, but they have far fewer numbers than pregnant women do. By the wording of the signs, they also have rights to these seats; unfortunately they have to ask. Perhaps a pin that indicates they are disabled is in order. It sounds like that might be a good idea.
Yeah, but cult aside, pregnant women are still generally more in need of a seat than an equivalent non-pregnant person.
Actually, considering that Europeans and North Americans use vastly disproportionate amounts of natural resources and energy and create vastly disproportionate amounts of pollution, one might argue that giving birth to a child in a developed country is massively selfish and destructive to the world and to the future of the human race.
I’ve Googled it for your convenience.
Those are all women whose fake pregnancies constituted serious fraud. If someone is willing to pretend to be pregnant to get a seat on a train, I’m willing to let it slide.
Several of those appear to all be referring to the same story, and none of them have anything to do with women demanding seats on buses or trains.
At what ratio of fakes/real do you think it’s more important to help those distressed than to avoid rewarding frauds? I mean, if it’s a 50% chance of rewarding a fraud? A 20% chance? 1%? .001%?
There are some items in pregnancy that are known: fatigue in the first trimester, balance issues at the end etc but even these will vary tremendously for any given pregnancy. There are a host of other items that MAY occur and can be more debilitating. I had two pregnancies and they were very different. I also saw pregnancy as something that needed to be done to have children (the children were the goal and not the pregnancy).
I give up seats for old people, for people with little kids, for pregnant women all the time. My view of it is that they need it more than I do and it just helps society along. I don’t think that women deserve it more than men but I do think the able bodied deserve it less than anyone else having problems.
We have BART and the seats closest to the door have more space along with the placard stating that the seats are reserved for the disabled/those in needed and need to be offered to them. I’ve seen several businessmen take these preferentially (more space!) and then not ever offer to people who were obviously disabled. I’ve also (rarely) seen other folks on the train shame them.
Hopefully she was pregnant and not just fat.
Bet if she was wearing a “Baby on Board” pin, you would have known for sure.
And that’s one of the driving concepts behind the pin. It’s not just that the woman is pregnant; it’s to avoid the extremely common problem of being afraid to offend an overweight non-pregnant woman by assuming that she’s pregnant. Wearing the pin removes all doubt. It’s not just about the woman.
I am not a regular user of the Tube - visit London half a dozen times a year at most - but I think standing up for the less able is more common than not, whether or not in the designated seats. Last year I travelled across London with my in-laws, elderly but not obviously infirm, and on each train several people were quick to offer seats. I was actually pleasantly surprised!
In the case of the OP I can’t really see what the problem was. If you sit in the designated seats you have got to be ready to get up as soon as someone who needs the seats boards the train - if you sit there it is no good burying yourself in your papers and trying to ignore the world. It sounds like the pregnant woman could have been more polite but it doesn’t sound as though she was particularly rude - sounds a straight forward request ‘Could you stand up please, I’d like to sit down’. As to tapping the pin, well it was maybe unnecessary but it explained why she wanted the seat without any long explanation. (Remember Brits hardly ever speak to strangers on trains 
)
I am not sure what **DragonAsh **expected the woman to do? Shut up and say nothing (very British!); hope someone else would see her problems and give up their seat leaving businessman to his paper work in the Priority Seat (DragonAsh maybe?); something else?
If she felt the need to ask, ask politely. Even Wolf-esque, ‘Pretty please with sugar on top, clean the fucking car’ polite might have sufficed.
I don’t understand this. These are not mutually exclusive conditions. She may well have been entitled to ask. She was still very rude. Don’t just take my word for it - my pregnant wife wanted to slap her.
FWIW, and as I’ve noted before, I was raised to believe in general courtesy. Hold the door open for others, male or female. If someone looks like they might need a seat, gender/age/condition aside, I offer them a seat. Most people I see do the same. If the person didn’t say ‘thank you’ I wouldn’t kick them back out of the seat (probably) but it would leave a bad taste in my mouth for a while. I suppose pregnant women expect others to give up our seats; perhaps others expect pregnant women to express their thanks and show that they realize they’re imposing?
Common courtesy helps make the world go 'round a little better and a lot nicer for a lot of people. Women like the original OP ruin it for everybody.
Those are stories of women who faked pregnancy over a period of time in order to get their hands on actual cash money.
I was asking for stories of women who falsely sport Baby on Board badges in order to get a seat on public transport. I simply don’t believe that this happens with any kind of significant frequency. And a generalised cynicism that there are bad people in the world seems to put you at risk of more false negatives than false positives.
On the face of it, this makes sense. But it belies an enormous amount of social conditioning, particularly prevalent on the Tube, which regards interrupting others during their commute as exceptionally rude and selfish. I’ll dig out the cite tonight, but I read of a study conducted on public transport (I think London, but maybe New York) which inadvertently showed this. Ostensibly, the study was into teh responses of commuters when asked for a seat. To test this, undergrad students were sent onto the Tube and told to approach commuters and say “Excuse me, may I have this seat?” (Explicitly, they were forbidden from giving a reason for their request.)
Most people would give up their seat. But all students reported high levels of anxiety - shaking, sweating, dry mouth - at the prospect of doing this, even after it was shown to be successful. So for all that it would be better if pregnant women (or anyone who felt they needed a seat) would just ask politely, there are complex social and psychological barriers which make this difficult. And those barriers may be irrational, and the robust individuals who congregate on the SDMB may find those held back by them weak and foolish, but they do exist. The advantage of the badge is that:
a) as mentioned it gives a clear signal to men who don’t want to embarrass themselves or an overweight non-pregnant woman by offering their seat to her
b) also as mentioned it alerts others to the pregnancy during times when it will not be apparent, especially the first trimester when non-visible symptoms such as morning sickness are at their worst
c) and it gives pregnant women who would otherwise be held back from requesting seats the confidence to break the mild social taboo of breaching an fellow commuter’s bubble of solitude.
If the question of the thread is “Should pregnant people be polite when asking for a seat?”, I really don’t see a Great Debate, or even a little discussion. Of course people should be polite. I think I’ve lost the point of the thread somewhere.
Yes, of course “Common courtesy makes the world got round” but I still have no sense of why you feel the behaviour was so rude that your wife wanted to slap her or shout at the man not to give up the seat.
You quote the woman directly as saying, ‘Could you stand up please, I’d like to sit down’ - why was this rude? She said please, she didn’t say, “Get out of the bloody seat, you selfish bastard.” Now that would have been rude. If she did not say “thank you” when the guy stood up - you do not say in the OP - that would be somewhat rude but not worth getting in a state over.
From the rest of the OP your problem seems to be with a pregnant woman asking for a seat. Ask yourself whether you would have thought it rude if a really elderly person or someone with crutches had used the exact same words?
I don’t think the ‘anxiety’ etc of the students had much to do with ‘interrupting people on the commute’ at all. It probably has a lot more to do with a) having to ask a complete stranger to b) do something, that c) could reasonbly be viewed as a selfish request.
If I have a broken leg and want to sit down, I know I may have a very good reason to want a seat, and may feel I should have the seat over the guy in gym shorts on his way to a tennis game - but it’s still a selfish request, justified/entitled or not.
I reckon the students would have a lot less anxiety about asking a complete stranger to move out of their seat on, say, an airplane, where they have assigned seating.
MarcusF, you do realize that tone of voice, body language etc will have a significant impact on how actions are viewed, right? ‘Actions speak louder than words’, as they say.
Of course - I just have a problem visualising the tone of voice or body language in this situation that were so offensive to you and your wife. I still ask how you think she should have tackled the situation?
I am pregnant and personally wouldn’t, but some people are really in pain, and have issues, especially hanging on to a moving bus.