32 celebrity moms on the worst parts of pregnancy

After struggling for years with various fertility issues, Halsey, whose pronouns are she/they, announced that they were pregnant with their first child in February of 2021. Because they had thought for so long that they would never be able to have kids, they were rightfully hurt when rumours started to circulate that their pregnancy had been an accident. They posted on their Instagram story a blank screen with the caption, "why is it ok to speculate and pass judgement about fertility and conception? My pregnancy was 100% planned, and I tried very hard for this bb. But I would be just as happy even if it were another way.” Recently, the singer told Allure that they've also struggled with keeping down their prenatal vitamins. "I was so angry with myself. You have one fucking job! One job! Take your prenatals! Your body’s doing everything else, you can’t even do that. I felt like such a failure." Luckily, they got the all-clear from their doctor that both they and their baby were perfectly healthy without the vitamins.

In mid-November 2018, the comedian posted a picture of herself in a hospital bed on her Instagram explaining that she’s suffering from extreme morning sickness, otherwise known as hyperemesis gravidarum (which Kate Middleton had, too!) “I’m fine. Baby’s fine but everyone who says the 2nd trimester is better is not telling the full story. I’ve been even more ill this trimester,” she wrote in her caption. “I have hyperemesis and it blows. Very lucky to be pregnant but this is some bullshit!”

We know that each pregnancy can look and feel completely different, but as Mandy Moore found out during her first pregnancy in 2020, each trimester can look and feel completely different too! In her third trimester, she took to Instagram to ask her followers, “is anyone else suddenly nauseous, exhausted, and weepy? What the heck?” The next day, Mandy was feeling more herself, sharing that “hormones are no joke!”

In March 2017, the singer asked her concert audience to cut her some slack with the lower notes in “Skyfall,” which she recorded when she was “heavily pregnant” with her son Angelo: “When I wrote that song, I was heavily pregnant, and a side effect—or symptom, however you felt about your pregnancy—was my voice got a lot lower. So my larynx dropped. Any other females here sound like a man when they were pregnant? No, just me? OK. Basically, that’s why the verse is so very low. That’s the reason, and these days I do struggle to get down there, so bear with me, all right?”

Back in July 2018 when rapper Cardi B was still pregnant with her daughter, she posted a video to Instagram showing baby Kulture bumping around inside her belly: “Yo. this baby today is buggin’. This been going on for hours. I been trying to take a nap and I can’t. Like I don’t know what’s goin’ on. It’s like she in the club or somethin’ in there. Like oh my god… It’s like she mad at me or something. Oh my god. I know you wanna come out but goddamn, don’t do me like this. I’m nice to you, I give you everything you wanna eat.” Hey Cardi, isn’t it the worst when they hit your bladder?

Our favourite celeb mom has lamented a lot about her motherhood woes, but we love this gem of a tweet from December 2017, when she was pregnant with her son Miles: “I love being pregnant. I like it more than not being pregnant. But the headaches, my god the headaches. Someone… please help. Don’t say water. Or Tylenol. Or iron. Or magnesium. I need witchcraft.”

The Younger actress took to Instagram in July 2018 to complain about how rough pregnancy was for her the second time around: “The boobs are big, the belly is big, the body is big. Man… pregnancy is hard… sick of getting up 9 times a night to pee and looking at this weird body in the mirror that is not my own at the moment.”

Do not ask Kelly Clarkson about her pregnancy glow—or her morning sickness. “I vomit a good dozen times a day. It’s, like, bad. I vomited before coming out here,” the American Idol winner said on The Ellen DeGeneres Show in December 2013, when she was pregnant with her first child, River. “I’m not even kidding. It’s so bad. It’s so bad. It’s, like, so gross. And that’s the thing, too: You’re not attractive when you’re pregnant. Everybody tells you [that] you glow and your hair is pretty and your nails are pretty. That is total crap. My nails are short, my hair still falls out—it’s not all lush and beautiful—and I have no glow. Unless it’s, like, something left over from a bad throw up. It’s horrible.”

Things got a little gassy for Katherine Heigl back in 2016 when she was pregnant with her third child, Joshua: “The thing that really got me was the indigestion,” she revealed to People. “You can ask my co-stars Doubt>, I never stopped burping. And I felt terrible about it, but there was just nothing I could do—I would be in the middle of saying something and I’d just start burping. It was awful. I felt like a frat boy.”

Vlogging her pregnancy woes on her YouTube channel, the Canadian actress got real about her struggle with bacne: “I also got really bad gestational acne on my back. I did not know that acne during pregnancy was even a thing. I don't know why I missed the memo but I did not know. I just knew the one day I completely broke out with horrible, really gnarly cystic acne all over my back, and you can’t use a lot of products that you can use when you’re not pregnant when you’re pregnant. So no salicylic acid—a lot of the things that basically help you get rid of acne and pimples. I’m sorry, it totally sucks.”

When she was pregnant with her third child in 2020, the singer was in a lot more pain than she had experienced with her first two kids. “My body was so achy,” she told E! News. “I thought I was going to need a cane at the end of my pregnancy, to be honest. I was penguin walking throughout the house at the end.”

The YouTuber behind the popular Miranda Sings videos and Haters Back Off Netflix series posted a picture on Instagram in July 2018 of her on stage holding her pregnant belly with this hilarious caption: “I haven’t pooped in weeks.” Yep, pregnancy constipation is a real thing!

Back in June 2014, Mila—who was pregnant with her daughter Wyatt—stopped by Jimmy Kimmel Live with an important PSA: “Hello, I’m Mila Kunis, with a very special message for all you soon-to-be fathers. Stop saying, ‘We’re pregnant.’ You’re not pregnant! Do you have to squeeze a watermelon-sized person out of your lady-hole? No. Are you crying alone in your car, listening to a stupid Bette Midler song? No. When you wake up and throw up, is it because you’re nurturing a human life? No. It’s because you had too many shots of tequila. Do you know how many shots of tequila we had? None. Because we can’t have shots of tequila. We can’t have anything because we’ve got your little love goblin growing inside of us. All you did was roll over and fall asleep.”

Like Mila, model Emily Ratajowski agrees that saying “we’re pregnant” has gotta go. While pregnant with her first child in 2020, she got candid with Vogue, saying, “I resent that his entire family’s DNA is inside of me but that my DNA is not inside him. ‘It just seems unfair,’ I say, and we both laugh. It’s kind of a joke, but there is truth behind it.” She also opened up about the inherently lonely nature of being pregnant, despite having a loving partner and friends. “I am ultimately alone with my body in this experience,” she says. “There is no one to feel it with me—the sharp muscular aches in my lower abdomen that come out of nowhere while I’m watching a movie or the painful heaviness of my breasts that now greets me first thing every morning. My husband has no physical symptoms in ‘our’ pregnancy.”

Back in April 2014, just before giving birth to her son Otis, Olivia posted this tweet about an all-too-common symptom: “Baby brain is real. I should not be permitted to operate heavy equipment, including iPhones.”

Khloe tweeted about this annoying side effect of pregnancy weight gain in January 2018, when she was pregnant with her daughter True: “I now have cellulite on my legs! Cute! Cute!” The reality star must have been doing some reading on pregnancy cellulite and discovered this not-very comforting tidbit: “Pregnancy may make cellulite look worse for a while, because the weight that you gain in pregnancy could make it more noticeable.”

Bigger boobs may be a positive for some women, but Eva wasn’t feeling them. “Everything’s uncomfortable,” she lamented to Jimmy Kimmel. “It’s not just your belly—everything gets bigger. I’ve never seen my thighs so big, and my boobs, they’re in the way of everything. It’s hard.”

In April 2013, Drew confessed to In Touch how things got a little hairy for her when she was pregnant with her first daughter Olive: “I got a wonderful little goatee—and it was red!” Adele also got a beard when she was pregnant. She named it Larry.

After giving birth to her third kid, Tucker, in September 2012, the actress told People that the thought of being pregnant again made her not want any more kids: “I hate being pregnant—the lack of energy at the beginning [and] having to change your diet. It’s a huge adjustment, and you have to change your whole lifestyle for a few months.”

Throughout her pregnancy with her first child in 2020/2021, singer Ellie Goulding told Vogue, “The sickness and tiredness was nothing I’d ever experienced before.” On top of that, she was conflicted by feelings that it wasn’t appropriate to talk about these struggles. “I feel like it’s a taboo to talk about pregnancy as being challenging. It’s not always serene and like you’re not always glowing.”

Although she stayed away from the public eye when she was pregnant, the young mom did eventually answer questions about her pregnancy on Twitter after her daughter Stormi was born: “There really was no worst part! Probably not being able to eat sushi lol.”

Cankles and swelling can be quite common during pregnancy, and it looks like Jessica Simpson is having a time with it! In an Instagram post from January 2019, Jessica posted a pic of her swollen foot and wrote in the caption, “Any remedies?! Help!!!!” getting loads of responses from fans. We’re here for you Jessica! Our advice is to keep your feet up and admire your nice pedicure.

The My Name is Earl actress spilled the pregnancy beans to the NZ Herald back in 2007 after she gave birth to her first child, Dezi: “Pregnancy was the biggest killer for me. I hated it—I hated being fat. My hormones were all over the place and I acted like some lunatic, picking fights with my boyfriend over how he made my coffee. On top of that I had this hideous ‘pregnancy mask’ skin discolouration which completely covered my face. You can normally use creams to disguise it, but not when you’re pregnant, so I had to walk around looking like I was horribly disfigured. This may sound arrogant, but I’m used to looking hot. I just wanted to cry all the time.”

The comedian appeared on Ellen back in April 2011, when she was pregnant with her second child, Penelope. While she said her pregnancies were easy, it’s the doctors who annoyed her the most: “I’ve been lucky—pretty easy pregnancies both times. But it’s funny because now I’m oldie olderson, I have what they call advanced maternal age. [Doctors] look at me like I’m just going to explode. They treat me very gingerly.”

The rapper kept her pregnancy mostly under wraps, announcing that she was expecting her first child just months before her son was born. But she did share a few tidbits on Insta, including the fact that early on she experienced horrible morning sickness—though it wasn’t limited to the early hours of the day., “Didn’t know that morning sickness could last all day,” she said.

The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt actress appeared on Today in April 2016, when she was pregnant with her son James. Her thoughts on the wooziness of the first trimester? “[It’s] just like a constant hangover.”

The Top Chef host told People about how she dealt with her itchy bump when she was pregnant with her daughter Krishna in 2009: “One thing that happens when you’re pregnant is that as your stomach starts to stretch, it itches! So I have to keep my belly really lubricated. Every morning, there’s a buttering ceremony after I get out of the shower. It’s really like basting a turkey with body butter.”

The New Girl actress appeared on Jimmy Kimmel Live in March 2015, when she was pregnant with her daughter Elsie, and expressed her anger at having to alter her coffee intake: “You can’t have cheese that tastes good. You can have a little bit [of], but I would have like four cups a day, and now I can have a half cup, which is a joke. It’s a total joke.”

The wait was the worst part for mom of four Maya Rudolph, who jokingly complained about it on Chelsea Lately in 2011, when she was pregnant with her son, Jack: “Honestly, because it’s my third, I feel like I’ve been pregnant for like six years, seriously.”

Read more: 15 wildest celebrity birth stories

Your belly isn’t the only thing that may grow when you’re carrying a baby! Towards the end of her first pregnancy, Katy Perry confessed on the Kyle & Jackie O radio show that her whole body was swollen. “My hands are swollen, my feet are starting to swell. It’s starting to get to that point.” She also shared her intense and newfound craving for hot sauce. “I like, literally, never cared for spice, and now, I have to carry Tabasco sauce in my purse like that woman,” she said. “I am Karen with her Tabasco sauce.”

If you’ve seen her Netflix special Baby Cobra, you know Ali Wong has her qualms about pregnancy. However, she revealed even more fun surprises in a 2016 interview with the Guardian: “I had no idea about things like the severe constipation, the bleeding gums or that my lasered moustache would come back. So those were all fun surprises.”

Then there’s Kim, who thought it all was the worst: “I’m gonna keep it real. For me, pregnancy is the worst experience of my life! LOL. I don’t enjoy one moment of it and I don’t understand people who enjoy it.”