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The New Yorker drew criticism Thursday after promoting an essay that described the binary definition of pregnancy as "misleading" and suggested a woman could be "kind of pregnant." The essay, "The Unsettling Ambiguity of Early Pregnancy," by Apoorva Tadepalli, examined what at-home pregnancy tests can and cannot tell women, grounded in the writer's experience with multiple pregnancy losses and a current pregnancy.
The magazine's promotion on X described at-home tests as capturing only a moment when an embryo has implanted, and said a woman might still be testing positive while being "kind of pregnant, a little bit pregnant, or almost pregnant, or maybe pregnant." That framing drew immediate pushback from several named voices who argued the language blurred a binary biological fact.
What the tests actually detect The Food and Drug Administration says at-home pregnancy tests detect human chorionic gonadotropin, or hCG, a hormone produced after a fertilized egg attaches to the uterine wall.
The agency notes that testing too early can produce inaccurate results and that a positive home test provides no information about how a pregnancy will develop.
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