Basic Trope: A pregnant character hides her (or his) pregnancy from other characters.
- Straight: Alice finds out she is pregnant. She doesn't tell anyone until she begins to show.
- Exaggerated:
- No one except Alice, not even her own husband Bob, knows Alice is pregnant until she goes into labor.
- Even Alice doesn't know she's pregnant!
- Downplayed:
- Alice waits until she is exactly 12 weeks along to announce the pregnancy.
- Alice does tell Bob that she's pregnant, but she refrains from telling their other children, since she doesn't feel ready to give them The Talk.
- Justified:
- Alice is unmarried, and lives in a society where there's a great stigma towards having children out of wedlock.
- Alice is facing a Teen Pregnancy in her senior year of high school, and wants to finish school.
- Alice doesn't want to announce her pregnancy too early, because she fears that doing so will cause a miscarriage.
- Doug and Carol have been struggling for well over a year to conceive, and Alice and Bob conceived on their honeymoon without even trying. Alice doesn't want to upset Carol, or ruin their friendship, or make Carol even more upset than she already is.
- Alice cheated on Bob with Charles, and became pregnant by him.
- Alice became pregnant as a result of rape and/or incest.
- Alice is experiencing a Mystical Pregnancy.
- Alice became pregnant by one of her students at Troperville High School.
- Alice is bound to rules concerning Contractual Purity for the sake of her job.
- Alice plans to abort. There's no sense in announcing the pregnancy if she's just going to terminate it.
- Alice had a miscarriage before, and she's worried that if she has another one, it would just make everyone who was looking forward to a baby sad.
- Alice's parents don't like Bob, so they wouldn't react kindly to learning she's pregnant by him.
- Inverted:
- As soon as she misses her period and takes a pregnancy test, Alice announces to everyone and their dog that she's pregnant.
- Alice is not pregnant, but would like everyone to believe so. (At least, until enough months go by and it's painfully obvious that this is not the case.)
- Subverted:
- Alice is an unmarried woman in a town that stigmatises out-of-wedlock pregnancies, but as soon as she misses her period and takes a pregnancy test, Alice informs Bob that she's pregnant.
- Alice initially tries to keep her pregnancy a secret, but she's suffering from Morning Sickness at work, and she gets found out by the office gossip. By lunch the next day, the entire office knows Alice is pregnant.
- Alice has been acting secretive around family, and she's been seen doing drawings of babies, hinting that she may be pregnant and keeping it a secret. However, she then makes a toast at her wedding, and drinks the champagne.
- Alice initially tries to keep her pregnancy secret, but then has a miscarriage.
- Alice appears to be keeping her pregnancy secret from everyone, but then it turns out that she's playing a character on a TV show, and either isn't even pregnant, or she is but it's not a secret.
- Alice misses her period and decides not to tell anyone, but then it turns out that she only had a Pregnancy Scare.
- Alice threw up and mentions "they can't know!", hinting that she has Morning Sickness and is keeping it secret, but then it's revealed that Alice is a virgin; she just didn't want everyone to know she was seasick.
- Alice gets pregnant and decides not to tell anyone, but later on, she has an abortion anyway.
- Double Subverted:
- She swears him to secrecy until she tells him it's OK to announce it.
- Alice did not tell any of her coworkers until the rumors got back to her. And her family and closest friends still have no idea.
- A few weeks before the wedding, Alice found out that she was pregnant, and had the venue give her sparkling cider or grape juice instead of champagne, and she didn't announce the pregnancy until three months after the wedding.
- She regrets having told her friends before the first trimester was up.
- The character is not pregnant, or has to hide her pregnancy for whatever reason(s), necessitating Alice to hide her bump onscreen.
- She doesn't tell anyone about the scare, and she keeps it quiet as long as possible when she becomes pregnant for real a few months later.
- Or so everyone in her life (except Bob) thinks. In actuality, Alice has been in a sexual relationship with Bob for months, and she got pregnant, and hasn't told anyone yet.
- Alice experienced a Mystical Pregnancy, and isn't sure how she's going to tell people that she's both pregnant and a virgin.
- She has to keep that a secret, along with the fact that she was ever pregnant in the first place, because in this setting Good Girls Avoid Abortion and My Girl Is Not a Slut.
- Parodied:
- Alice engages in Hide Your Pregnancy tactics in Real Life. Everyone is surprised when she does announce that she's pregnant.
- Bob is the one who gets pregnant.
- Zig Zagged: Alice announces her first pregnancy right away, keeps the second one quiet for the first trimester, and doesn't even mention the third one until she's in the delivery room.
- Averted:
- Alice does not become pregnant In-Universe.
- Alice is a virgin/past menopause/was born without a uterus/all of the above, making a pregnancy extremely unlikely.
- Enforced: ???
- Lampshaded: "I have something to tell you, but you have to swear on your life that you won't tell anyone else. I'm pregnant."
- Invoked: Alice is in a Secret Relationship with Bob, and becomes pregnant, in a society where having sex (let alone children) out of wedlock is scandalous...and possibly deadly.
- Exploited: Todd Awful threatens to tell everyone that Alice is pregnant if she doesn't do what he wants.
- Defied: Alice knows that people are going to find out sooner or later, so she figures she might as well tell them now and get it over with.
- Discussed: "What if Alice is actually pregnant but just refuses to tell us?!"
- Conversed: "Why does she have to hide it? They are married already, and the guy said he wanted children..." "Oh, I don't know. I think she'll announce it in the very last scene, just for the show to end on an especially touching note."
- Implied: Nobody talks as though Alice might be pregnant, but she's been gaining weight and having Wacky Cravings.
- Played for Drama: Alice lives in a corrupt town, and may be executed for premarital sex if someone finds out she's pregnant.
- Played for Horror: Alice refuses to talk because she's carrying the Antichrist.
I don't have a link back to My Secret Pregnancy, I've just been eating a lot of ice cream lately.
