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The New Yorker draws criticism for framing pregnancy as ambiguous in essay on early testing

9/18/2026

The New Yorker drew criticism Thursday after promoting an essay that described the binary distinction between being pregnant and not pregnant as "misleading," suggesting a woman could be "kind of pregnant, a little bit pregnant, or almost pregnant, or maybe pregnant" while still testing positive.

The essay, "The Unsettling Ambiguity of Early Pregnancy" by Apoorva Tadepalli, examined what early at-home testing can and cannot tell a woman about a pregnancy's outcome, drawing on Tadepalli's account of positive tests across five pregnancies and repeated uncertainty about viability.

The magazine promoted the piece on X with language that critics said conflated the existence of a pregnancy with its prognosis.

Roxanne Hoge, chair of the Los Angeles County Republican Party and a mother of four, told Fox News Digital that uncertainty over viability does not change whether a woman is pregnant.

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