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tartare, and of course joined the family for foie gras over Christmas. She just makes sure to eat it in good restaurants or at home. Her one concession is that when she eats unpasteurized cheese, she cuts off the rind.
    I don’t actually witness any pregnant women eating oysters. If I did, I might have to throw my enormous body over the table to stop them. They’d certainly be surprised. It’s clear why French waiters are baffled when I interrogate them about the ingredients in each dish. Frenchwomen generally don’t make a fuss about this.
    The French pregnancy press doesn’t dwell on unlikely worst-case scenarios.
Au contraire
, it suggests that what mothers-to-be need most is serenity. “9 Months of Spa” is the headline in one French magazine.
The Guide for New Mothers
, a free booklet prepared with support from the French health ministry,
says its eating guidelines favor the baby’s “harmonious growth,” and that women should find “inspiration” from different flavors. “Pregnancy should be a time of great happiness!” it declares.
    Is all this safe? It sure seems like it. France trumps the United States on nearly every measure of maternal and infant health. The infant mortality rate is 57 percent lower in France than it is in America. According to Unicef, about 6.6 percent of French babies have a low birth weight,compared with about 8 percent of American babies. An American woman’s risk of dying during pregnancy or delivery is 1 in 4,800; in France it’s 1 in 6,900. 1
    What really drives home the French message that pregnancy should be savored isn’t the statistics or the pregnant women I meet, it’s the pregnant cat. She’s a slender, gray-eyed cat who lives in our courtyard and is about to deliver. Her owner, a pretty painter in her forties, tells me that she plans to have the cat spayed after the kittens are born. But she couldn’t bear to do it before the cat had gone through a pregnancy. “I wanted her to have that experience,” she says.
    Of course Fr K>Of
mothers-to-be aren’t just calmer than we are. Like the cat, they’re also skinnier. Some pregnant Frenchwomen do get fat. In general, body-fat ratios seem to increase the farther you get from central Paris. But the middle-class Parisians I see all around me look alarmingly like those American celebrities on the red carpet. They have basketball-sized baby bumps pasted onto skinny legs, arms, and hips. Viewed from the back, you usually can’t tell they’re expecting.
    Enough pregnant women have these proportions that I stop gawking when I pass one on the sidewalk or in the supermarket. This French norm is strictly codified. American pregnancy calculators tell me that with my height and build I should gain up to thirty-five pounds during my pregnancy. But French calculators tell me to gain no more than twenty-six and a half pounds. (By the time I see this, it’s too late.)
    How do Frenchwomen stay within these limits? Social pressure helps. Friends, sisters, and mothers-in-law openly transmit the message that pregnancy isn’t a free pass to gorge. (I’m spared the worst of this because I don’t have French in-laws.) Audrey, a French journalist with three kids, tells me that she confronted her German sister-in-law, who had started out tall and svelte.
    “The moment she got pregnant she became enormous. And I saw her and I found it monstrous. She told me, ‘No, it’s fine, I’m entitled to relax. I’m entitled to get fat. It’s no big deal,’ et cetera. For us, the French, it’s horrible to say that. We would
never
say that.” She adds a jab disguised as sociology: “I think the Americans and the Northern Europeans are a lot more relaxed than us, when it comes to aesthetics.”
    Everyone takes for granted that pregnant women should battle to keep their figures intact. While my podiatrist is working on my feet, she suddenly announces that I should rub sweet almond oil on my belly to avoid stretch marks. (I do this dutifully,