A New Yorker essay questioning the certainty of early pregnancy tests has drawn sharp pushback from conservative women’s advocates in Los Angeles County, who say the piece blurs a biological line that shouldn’t be blurred.
The essay, “The Unsettling Ambiguity of Early Pregnancy” by Apoorva Tadepalli, draws on the writer’s experience with multiple pregnancy losses and her current pregnancy to explore uncertainty around early testing, miscarriage and fetal viability. The New Yorker promoted the piece on X by describing at-home tests as capturing only a single moment after implantation, adding that someone could be “kind of pregnant, a little bit pregnant, or almost pregnant, or maybe pregnant” while still testing positive.
The framing prompted criticism from local Republican figures who argue that doubt over whether a pregnancy will remain viable does not change whether a woman is pregnant in the first place.
Los Angeles County Republican Party Chair Roxanne Hoge, a mother of four, told Fox News Digital that the essay conflated two separate questions.
“As a mother of four and an actual biological woman, I must applaud the author for noticing that women do, in fact, make babies. While I sympathize with her on the very sad reality of carrying a pregnancy after a loss, this was a lot of words to try and pretend that a fetus is a clump of cells. You’re either pregnant or you’re not.”
Elizabeth Barcohana, the America First Policy Institute’s California ambassador to the America First Women’s Initiative, said the article confuses the existence of a pregnancy with a woman’s knowledge of whether it is viable.
“A woman cannot be ‘a little bit pregnant.’ Pregnancy is a physical, biological state that begins when a fertilized embryo implants in the uterus and triggers a chemical hormonal reaction. This article is not about being pregnant. It is about a woman’s experience about knowing whether she is carrying a viable healthy pregnancy.”
Tadepalli wrote that she tested positive during five pregnancies and spent stretches of each not knowing whether she would miscarry, an uncertainty she said shaped her ability to emotionally embrace her current pregnancy. Much of the essay examines what early tests can and cannot reveal about what happens next.
Lisa Cusack, president of the Don’t L.A. My Burbank PAC, said she read the piece as an effort to make pregnancy status a matter of interpretation.
“This article just seems like a tortured attempt to make pregnancy into a subject experience in order to justify abortion. The fact that an at-home pregnancy isn’t sophisticated enough to pick up the beginning stages of every pregnancy doesn’t mean you’re ‘kind of pregnant,’ or that pregnancy itself, which literally begins with conception and ends with birth, is ‘nonlinear.’ Women have always known that early pregnancies sometimes don’t take or show up on tests, but that doesn’t change the fact that you’re either pregnant or not, whether you know it or not or want it or not.”
Barcohana said the underlying experience Tadepalli describes is one many women who have suffered pregnancy loss would recognize, and faulted The New Yorker’s editors for the way the piece was presented rather than the author herself.
“The New Yorker’s editors betrayed the author with this provocative headline, because what she’s really talking about — in a vulnerable way that millions of women can empathize with — is the utility and impact on women of unreliable early testing. She tried to talk about something totally legitimate for women trying to start a family, and they hijacked it.”
Fox News Digital said it reached out to The New Yorker for comment but had not received a response.
Medical guidance draws a similar distinction between detecting a pregnancy and determining whether it will continue. The Food and Drug Administration says at-home tests detect human chorionic gonadotropin, a hormone produced once a fertilized egg attaches to the uterine wall, and warns that testing too early can produce inaccurate results. A positive result, the agency notes, does not indicate how a pregnancy will develop. The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists likewise states that pregnancy begins at implantation, while assessing viability requires further evaluation as the pregnancy progresses.
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