The Haunting of Pregnancy Temporal Disjunctures in Reddit's Bumper Groups

This paper analyses Bumper groups on Reddit – online communities of pregnant women who are due in the same month, where they share their experiences, anxieties and personal details regarding themselves and their unborn child. These groups usually become private after the first trimester of pregnancy, and are therefore considered spaces in which women feel safe to share information on their daily struggles such as cravings, baby shower woes, mood swings and, more haunting, genetic testing, and miscarriages. Through the proposed framework of health hauntology in this special issue, I want to argue in this paper that Bumper groups on Reddit are careful attempts to deal with ghosts, while conjuring a plethora of presences – unknown and haunting at the same time. I read Bumper groups as spectral spaces where time folds: archived posts on previous losses, real-time exchanges, and future-oriented discussions on labour and becoming a mother coexist, creating a layered temporality. While pregnancy is often represented as a linear journey marked by many different milestones, the non-linear lived experience of past losses, present anxieties, and future uncertainties disrupts this narrative. This study shows how a Bumper group might challenge traditional assumptions about pregnancy as a straightforward linear experience. Instead, pregnancy becomes deeply entwined with digital affordances, and is made up out of fractured temporalities. By focusing on Reddit, a relatively underexplored platform in discussions of digital motherhood, this paper contributes a new perspective on the intersection of digital media, pregnancy, and the haunting of time.