Pillow Pregnancy - Television Tropes & Idioms

Who is the one person no one ever questions or suspects? A pregnant woman! Many have picked up this handy little fact and seen its potential for whenever you need to get away with something. But real pregnancy is messy and takes too long. Not to worry! There is a simple trick to getting the full effect of being pregnant without having to go through all the trouble of actually becoming pregnant:

Step 1: Stuff a pillow up your shirt.

Congratulations! Now everyone who sees you will conclude that you are in some late stage of pregnancy and won't question or harass you about anything! Also quite useful if someone actually thinks you are pregnant when you really aren't, although they may get curious when the natural follow-up never happens.

Sometimes two boys will do this to be pregnant woman in a Trench coat.

A form of Obfuscating Disability. Compare Fake Boobs.

Examples:

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Advertising

In a Mentos ad, a man and his date skip out on a restaurant bill by pretending she just went into labor and rushing to their motorcycle. Turns out she just had a motorcycle helmet under her dress.
- A similar ad was featuring a couple driving at high speed during the streets. They get stopped by the police and, upon seeing the very-pregnant woman, they escort them to the hospital. When the couple run up the stairs, the soccer ball slips from underneath her dress. It was a car ad.
- Yet another advert had a couple getting intimate in a theatre. The woman cries out loudly enough to halt the play. The man balls a jacket underneath her dress, and by the time people get up there, makes out she's going into labour.

Anime and Manga

In the first episode of Cowboy Bebop, a woman named Catalina fakes a pregnancy by stuffing drugs up her dress. Yes, you heard right. She smuggles drugs in a fake belly. What happens to her in the end is heartbreaking.
In the "Escape From Pain" episode of Trigun, Milly smuggles a teenage girl under her coat. Though the girl is pretty petite, and Milly rather tall, the resultant bulge is still large enough that she attracts curious scrutiny (including one old woman asking if she's expecting sextuplets), though she still manages to use this to fool the people chasing the girl she's hiding.
Miu from Strawberry Marshmallow decides to stuff a pillow under her nightdress after sleeping with Nobue. No, not in that way.
Nobue: Well that was fast.
In Victory Gundam, the White Ark is boarded at one point when attempting to sneak into Zanscare territory. The crew, mostly consisting of kids and Marvet, pretend to be Zanscare citizens while hiding their equipment under Marbet's shirt, making her look very pregnant. In a twist, Marbet actually was pregnant at the time, but it was too early for it to be showing.

Comics

In one FoxTrot strip, Jason and Marcus have pillows under their shirts. At first they're bugging people with "I think we ate too much Halloween candy" and then when that doesn't get a reaction, it's "I think we're pregnant."

Film

Julia Roberts' character in Ocean's Twelve is coerced into doing this so she can pretend to be Julia Roberts...wait...
Angelina Jolie does it in the movie Taking Lives, though she uses a more convincing prosthetic to convince Ethan Hawke that she's eight months pregnant with his child, so that he'll think she's unable to fight back when he attacks her. In the end, she shoots him dead, and then finally removes the prosthetic to show the audience that she had been faking her pregnancy for nine whole months, simply to bait him.
- This also creates an opportunity for a particularly disturbing Kick the Dog moment on the part of Ethan Hawke's character, who stabs her "pregnant" belly with a pair of scissors, evidently willing to kill her even though he believed her pregnant with his own twins...
In the film The Cooler, Mikey and Charlene make use of this trope. They extract money from Bernie, and later Charlene attempts to stop a fight by pretending to go into labor.
The underrated Lindsay Lohan film Labor Pains features the main character doing this with one of her couch cushions, in front of a room full of baby shower guests who until that moment had thought she was genuinely pregnant.
In the movie Young Doctors In Love, a prostitute named Julie uses a balloon to fake her pregnancy (she was making Heel Face Turn out of the business), but a Jerkass doctor pops it in a Kick the Dog moment.
Done by Jessica Alba's character in the movie P.U.N.K.S..
Used for comic and not deceptive effect: in the movie of Funny Girl, Fanny Brice is cast in the Ziegfield Follies as the star of the number "His Love Makes Me Beautiful." However, Fanny thinks she's far too ugly for any man to sing about her rapturous beauty, so she plays the number for laughs by sticking a pillow under the belly of the wedding dress she's wearing, and singing to match.
Briefly done for a gag in Brain Donors. Literal ambulance chaser Roland T. Flakfizer arrives at the scene of a minor car accident and sees a woman passenger. He immediately sticks an instant-inflating pillow under her dress and starts loudly yelling about the liability costs.

Literature

Short story "Golden Girl" by Ellis Peters. While a pregnant woman is taking a sea voyage, the ship is damaged and starts to sink. After the woman puts on a life jacket, one of the ship's officers drops her into the sea so she can be rescued by nearby boats. Much to his surprise, she sinks straight to the bottom. It turns out that she had been smuggling 30 pounds of gold bars in the padding under her maternity smock.
In Garden of Shadows, the prequel to V. C. Andrews' Flowers in the Attic series, Olivia Foxworth must stuff her clothes with a progressively larger series of pillows to make it appear that she really is pregnant, so the servants don't realize that the baby who is about to join the family is really the result of her husband Malcolm raping his stepmother.
- Also done in Olivia, where Olivia Logan (no relation to Olivia Foxworth) does this so that she can pass off her sister's illegitimate child as her own.
Sara has one in the Artefacts Of Power series by Maggie Furey.
In the second Hunger Games book, Catching Fire, Peeta tells the entire country on live television that Katniss is pregnant, when she is not, and she had no idea he planned on doing this. However, she thinks she is going to be dead within the week and doesn't worry about it. Many people suspect that they are lying and joke around with her. When she does, in fact, survive, she says she miscarried after being electrocuted.

Live Action TV

On Friends, Monica has decided to shoplift a blue sweater as her "something blue" and "something borrowed." She shoves it up her blouse and has a quick maternal moment.
Subverted in the The Drew Carey Show "What's Wrong With This Episode?", where Kate and Lewis both (supposedly) have a Pillow Pregnancy, but in reality Christa Miller is actually pregnant, and is pulling a Hide Your Pregnancy.
- Done in an early season where Kate's Pillow Pregnancy was actually her way of smuggling beer into a professional wrestling event. Leading to a humorous case of a professional wrestler telling her she shouldn't drink when pregnant.
A similar stunt was pulled on Kate and Allie in The Eighties, to hide Susan St. James' pregnancy by stuffing Jane Curtin to match in one episode. (They justified it by making it a flashback episode to when the title characters were pregnant with their daughters.)
An episode of FX had criminals try robbing a gold depository, and threaten to shoot a pregnant woman. She was released by the criminals later, only for her to report the police activity on the ground. They eventually discover that she wasn't pregnant using thermal imaging, but only after the newsreporter said it wasn't necessary and could be told by how she was walking.
An episode of The A-Team had Murdock posing as a pregnant woman (long story). Instead of a pillow, Murdock's "baby" was a bag filled with dynamite.
An episode of M*A*S*H had Klinger try this in yet another attempt to get out of the Army. Col. Blake didn't buy it for a second.
An episode of Kenan & Kel has them attempt to speak to someone in a hospital. To get in they use this trope to disguise Kel as a pregnant woman going into labor. This finally leads to the line:
"Congratulations, you've given birth to a lovely fluffy cushion."
This occurs in an episode of Operation Repo, in which a woman fakes being pregnant, even going so far as to fake going into labor, in order to keep her car from being repossessed. When her ruse was found out, the Repo team was not happy.
In the "Harlem Globetrotters" episode of TV Funhouse, the team accidentally travels back to the first Christmas, where they decide to play Mary, Joseph and some others in a game of basketball for who gets the inn as opposed to who sleeps in the barn. Naturally, the Globetrotters PWN the Bethlehem players until Baby Jesus is born, after which he begins defeating the Globetrotters with his miracle powers. Meadowlark then gets one of his brilliant ideas, and takes a hint from Mary by pulling a Pillow Pregnancy with the basketball under his shirt, in order to sneak past and score the winning basket.
In the Monk episode "Mr. Monk Is At Your Service", to further a murder investigation, Natalie has to go to a party hosted by Paul Buchanan, who had stalked her in high school. To discourage Buchanan's attempted advances, she stuffs a pillow under her shirt and pretends to be pregnant.
- It is made more awesome if you know that Traylor Howard actually was pregnant - as seen by earlier scenes which are positioned so that she is standing behind an open car door, sitting down at a desk, etc, to hide her chest, both in this episode and in other episodes in this part of season 5. The Pillow Pregnancy hence averts the need for her to hide her enlarged abdomen.
- A variant was also used in the Tie-In Novel Mr. Monk and the Blue Flu, when Monk and Natalie go shopping at a department store in one scene and end up busting a shoplifting ring. Natalie has a small run-in with a pregnant woman who snatches a blouse she intended to get for Julie. The pregnant woman drops her purse and immediately walks off. Once the shoplifter with the oxygen tank is secured, one of the security guards asks Monk if there's anyone else they need to be aware of, and Monk mentions a pregnant woman who is not pregnant. Knowing that said woman is faking it, Natalie tackles her, causing her tummy pack to burst open, and she gets back the blouse she wanted. Natalie then asks Monk how he figured it out and Monk gives a Sherlock Scan explanation: the pregnant woman walked like a normal person, instead of waddling, and she bent over at the waist to pick up her purse.
In a deleted scene from Firefly, River, in one of her crazier moments, uses a pillow to pretend to be pregnant...so Book can marry her to Simon.
Infamously, Terri on Glee fakes a pregnancy for months on her husband by doing this (and not allowing him anywhere near her).
Kari Byron announced her pregnancy with a short video on the Discovery website. Grant had a hard hat stuffed under his shirt to provide fake bump, and Tory had a ball under his. Kari's bump was real.
An episode of The Muppet Show had Miss Piggy singing "Waiting At The Church" while apparently heavily pregnant. At the end, Kermit asks her if she's going to take that silly pillow from under her dress.
The episode "Better Than Life" of Red Dwarf features Rimmer's wife pregnant in a VR simulation. In the outtakes, she blows a line and says "Sorry my pregnancy fell out"
An early challenge on season 6 of Project Runway was to make a maternity outfit. However, instead of designing for real pregnant women, the designers designed for their regular models wearing a pillow. Some of them did not look convincingly pregnant.
On Arrested Development, Maggie Lizer is supposed to be a surrogate mother, but after she couldn't get pregnant she delegates it and pretends to carry the baby with a realistic false belly.
CSI NY did this with a shoplifter, who got the items out of the store by putting them inside her clothes and making herself look pregnant. Stella wasn't fooled because her ankles weren't swollen and she was wearing high heels. When Stella makes the two items fall out, she says "Congratulations...twins!"
Done in Good Luck Charlie when Amy and Teddy go to a restaurant to get some salad dressing that supposedly induces labor (Amy was a few weeks late on her latest pregnancy). Teddy managed to sneak into the restaurant's kitchen and steal the dressing then tried to tuck it underneath her shirt as if she too was pregnant. Unfortunately one of the employees found her out straight away.

Music Videos

In the music video for Jane's Addiction's "Been Caught Stealing", a man dresses in full drag as a very pregnant woman for his shoplifting trip to the grocery store.

Theatre

A sketch in The Secret Policeman's Ball (1979) starring Eleanor Bron and Peter Cook has this trope as the point of the joke. She seems to think she's really pregnant, he can tell right away that she's not.
Doll Tearsheet is accused of this in Henry IV Part 2. Productions that don't cut the scene entirely sometimes imply that she is actually pregnant (after all, she is seen to be suffering from nausea in her first appearance).

Webcomics

In Errant Story, Meji once sneaked out of a guarded city by pretending to be pregnant. Her 'belly', however, actually contained her snarky, flying cat familiar, Ellis. Meanwhile, Ian dressed like a priest and persuaded the guards to let her through, doing a cover-up.^note

Western Animation

In an episode of Avatar The Last Airbender, Katara dons this guise to pretend to be "Sapphire Fire" [Sokka's "wife" and Aang's "mother"].
In a newer episode of Spongebob Squarepants, Mr. Krabs attempts this when he steals money from an arcade with Gary. He pulls it off until Spongebob arrives.
In G.I. Joe: Renegades, Scarlett—after a pair of failed Bavarian Fire Drills—poses as a trailer-trash babymama to infiltrate a prison that Duke is in.

Real Life

According to Hippo Eats Dwarf: A Guide to Hoaxes and Other B.S., the fake pregnancy is a classic con: usually going that a girl pads herself up and then pretends that she wants to put the "baby" up for adoption, getting whoever wants to adopt the baby to pay her in advance (possibly multiple couples at once!). She then runs off, never to be heard from again.
Another example is Erin McGaw, who faked being pregnant for a school project. She fooled everyone for three months, until her teacher pulled the plug.
- Another high school girl, Gabby Rodriguez, carried out a similar project - eventually earning the attention of national television and getting her a book deal.
The Monk example up above is very much true for shoplifting and drug smuggling. However, the version in which someone guts a real baby and stuffs it full of bags of coke is still just an urban legend.
Also true for some baby thieves; unable to have children of their own, they fake pregnancies and then kidnap a baby at about the right time, fooling people around them into thinking the new child is actually theirs. There have been a few recent cases where it gets much worse, and women have murdered and cut open actual pregnant women to steal their unborn children.