There’s rarely a quiet time to be a woman in the spotlight, but especially not with a rumoured baby bump on show. That’s if the recent pictures of Lady Gaga are anything to go by, who is the latest celebrity to fall victim of the pregnancy rumour mill.

It all started after paparazzi shots circulated of her attending her sister’s wedding to Michael Polansky in Maine, with a supposed baby bump. This led to a slew of headlines speculating that she might be pregnant. One read ‘Lady Mama?’ while another said, ‘Lady Gaga sparks pregnancy rumours as she “displays bump” at family wedding.’ Another went as far to say that Lady Gaga had ‘shared dreams of having “a very strong family with at least three children’ in a past interview.’

Naturally, the rumours have also taken off on social media. ‘Lady Gaga is glowing and totally looks pregnant!’ writes one X user. But Lady Gaga hasn’t publicly confirmed she’s pregnant, meaning all this discourse about her body is based off pure speculation. As another user wrote on X ‘it’s 2024… when we going to stop analyzing women’s bodies and commenting about someone possibly being pregnant?’

Lady Gaga joins a long line of celebrities who have recently been subject to pregnancy rumours that feel like a throwback to the heyday of noughties tabloids. Hailey Bieber, Sienna Miller, and Suki Waterhouse all experienced speculation around their pregnancies before they officially announced them. For Hailey, the rumours started as far back as 2017 (when she was just 21), after she made an appearance at the Daily Front Row Fashion Awards. She responded to the rumours with a tweet that quipped ‘Yes, I’m pregnant and Kendall Jenner is the baby mama’ – but the speculation only continued to increase year after year.

This led Hailey to address the pregnancy rumours in interviews, opening up to GQ last year about how they had affected her. ‘Recently, everybody was like, “Oh, my God, she’s pregnant,” and that’s happened to me multiple times before,’ she said. ‘There is something that’s disheartening about, Damn, I can’t be bloated one time and not be pregnant? It would be a lie if I was like, “Oh, yeah, I don’t give a shit.”’ She added that ‘when there comes a day’ that she is pregnant, ‘you, you as in the internet, will be the last to know.’ Hailey and Justin publicly revealed their baby news in May this year in an Instagram post.

Suki’s pregnancy announcement was also taken away from her thanks to tabloid rumours. These came about after she was pictured on a hike in Los Angeles with her partner Robert Pattinson, where she can be seen sporting a small bump underneath her clothes. After the pictures were published, her Instagram was filled with intrusive questions asking her about the pregnancy, which she announced publicly in November 2023. The same went for Sienna Miller, who sparked pregnancy rumours in July last year when she was photographed in St. Tropez wearing a strapless gown over her swimsuit which highlighted a growing stomach.

All this feels worryingly familiar. Back in the noughties, headlines about baby bumps (whether real or not) were a mainstay of the US tabloids. Those who grew up around this time will be familiar with the taglines ‘Tum Thing to tell us?’ and ‘Is she? Isn’t she?’ While the past few years has seen outlets shy away from reporting about celebrity pregnancies, the Lady Gaga rumours raise the question of whether we are heading back in that direction.

One celebrity who found herself at the centre of countless baby rumours was Jennifer Aniston. Headlines from magazines in the US at the time read ‘it’s official for Jen 3 months pregnant’ while another showed a picture of her on the beach with an arrow pointing to her tummy that read ‘first bump pics world exclusive.’ The speculation got so much that Jen wrote a piece in the Huffington Post titled ‘’For The Record, I Am Not Pregnant. What I Am Is Fed Up.’

In the article, she explained how she had ‘grown tired’ of the problematic narratives around women’s bodies, writing ‘I’m not in pursuit of motherhood because I feel incomplete in some way, as our celebrity news culture would lead us all to believe. I resent being made to feel “less than” because my body is changing and/or I had a burger for lunch and was photographed from a weird angle and therefore deemed one of two things: “pregnant” or “fat.”’

As Jen’s case shows, there’s plenty of instances when this speculation is just downright wrong. Sometimes celebrities might be photographed after they’ve eaten a big lunch, when they’re bloated or if they have put on a few pounds. All of this is totally normal, yet attaching pregnancy rumours to these pictures opens the door for women’s bodies to be speculated on.

Even when celebrities do turn out to be pregnant, such reporting takes away from one of the most private moments in their lives. Any mother will know that the first twelve weeks of pregnancy are incredibly delicate due to the heightened risk of miscarriage, and even after that some women may not feel ready to share their news with the world. But for some reason, they are expected to. After Rihanna gave birth to her second child without announcing it, many outlets reported that she had ‘secretly’ had a baby, as if she owed us some kind of explanation. Headlines like this suggest a possessiveness over women’s bodies, taking away their agency to announce pregnancy in their own time – or, if they prefer to, not at all.

For women who have a history of miscarriages, this reporting can feel particularly intrusive. In 2022, Chrissy Teigen expressed how difficult it was being consistently asked about pregnancy despite being open about suffering a miscarriage in 2020. ‘I know it’s said with excited, good intentions, [but] it just kind of sucks to hear because I am the opposite of pregnant,’ she said on Instagram.

That’s not to say there hasn’t been progress in how pregnancy is represented in the celeb world. Over the past year, Rihanna and Sienna have rewritten the rulebook of maternity style, proudly displaying their bumps in bold outfits that are a far cry from those on the front covers two decades ago. And the media speculation has certainly quietened down since the 2010s (who can forget that moment Beyonce was rumoured to be sporting a prosthetic belly after her baby bump ‘appeared to deflate’ on an Australian talk show?)

But despite this, the problematic narrative that celebrities still owe us some kind of public explanation about their changing bodies remains. Pregnant or not, it’s never ok to speculate on women’s bodies. Let’s not take away the small moment of privacy that