The Morning Sickness Misnomer

Posted on Oct 10, 2011 | Morning Sickness News Category | | Print This Article

photo credit: James Whitesmith

Morning sickness is one of those things. We try to be discreet about it. Rather than calling it “pregnancy-induced nausea” or “pukey-preggie syndrome,” we have a nice polite name for it. Why, we even use the word “morning,” which conjures up thoughts of a rising sun and birds chirping in the distance.

Anyone who’s had morning sickness, however, can tell you that the name is completely inaccurate.

Let’s face it: morning sickness does happen in the morning. Of course, it also happens in the afternoon. It happens at midday. It happens in the evening, and it happens at nighttime.

Some women have morning sickness only after dinner; some only have it at random intervals. Others might have it a couple of times a day like clockwork.

For some women, it happens around the clock. Sometimes, even famous women like Bryce Dallas Howard have morning sickness all day long.

It’s not only the “morning” part of it that’s wildly inaccurate, either. When you say “sickness,” you come up with images of the plague, or at least of the common cold. The problems is that both of these ailments end relatively quickly (one more horribly than the other, admittedly).

Morning sickness tends to linger, however. For most women, it’ll end around the start of the second trimester. Some women, though, will have morning sickness throughout their pregnancy. Here again, we refer you to the story on Bryce Dallas Howard.

To be sure, women have been calling it “morning sickness” for a long time. It’s a relic from a bygone era when it wasn’t polite to talk about your pregnancy, or at least about your pregnancy discomforts. Thankfully, those days are gone. Women can talk openly about such things, compare notes, and in many cases find some relief that they might otherwise not have had. You reading this blog post is a wonderful example of exactly that.

So, what about you? Did you have morning sickness throughout pregnancy? What time of day was it worse? Any good ideas about an alternative name for morning sickness?

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