But along with the magic of pregnancy and its modern day accompanying factoids comes serious anxiety. If you were hoping to have a nice relaxed pregnancy in the year 2018, you can forget about it — unless reading about “common pregnancy side effects” like haemorrhoids fills you with a sense of calm. Maybe it’s the hormones, but our addiction to information only increases while we gestate. And these days, one can scarcely get a paper cut without ending up on WebMD learning that, in a complication or two, we’ll die. During pregnancy, even when nothing is actually wrong, our phones make it infinitely possible to learn about all the potential ways our bodies could deteriorate in some horrific way at any given moment. We could all get hit by a bus tomorrow, but pregnant women tend to consider these kinds of possibilities more than the average person.