Greater Expectation

Luxury Services for Pregnant Women Are Booming

Women get pregnant. This is how civilization moves forward. After centuries, somebody has figured out how to fully monetize this process.

At Becoming Mom in Mason, Ohio, pregnant receptionist Amanda Grimm is helping a pregnant client decide between the nursing cream and the Mama Mio Tummy Rub butter. In the back, a pregnant Claire Schwab is getting a prenatal massage from the recently pregnant Jennifer Reisenberg, and a very pregnant Jackie Miller is giving a pedicure to Leah Swallinger, who just had a baby.

Miller and Swallinger are talking about raging hormones, a common topic of conversation at Becoming Mom, a spa devoted to pampering soon-to-be and new mothers. "That, and double strollers," says Swallinger, a family therapist. "We talk a lot about double strollers." Next to her sits a half-eaten chocolate bowl of chocolate mousse, part of her "cravings" pedicure. Her feet are coated in paraffin that looks like Hershey's syrup.

These conversations are squeezed between the "Yummy Tummy" belly facials, and the "Perfect Pregnancy" massages, and the manicures using "pregnancy-appropriate" essential oils and polishes. The treatment rooms smell like arnica. It's all glowy and expectant, chatty and Zen and oozing maternal, as if the lavender walls may start lactating.

There are no male employees here, no men at all except for the dads-to-be who occasionally slink in, drop $269 on a "Baby Me" package, slink out.

Pregnancy used to be something camouflaged and endured, nine months of achy backs and euphemisms and elastic waistbands with a 7-pound, 9-ounce reward at the end.

Not anymore. For a certain kind of mom with a certain kind of priority, pregnancy is a heady blur of spa visits and personal pregnancy chefs, of baby planners and "babymoons." Pregnancy is not a journey. Pregnancy is a destination, a showplace.

About 60 percent of U.S. spas now offer pregnancy massages along with regular services, according to the International Spa Association, and maternity-specific spas are gestating all over the country. Dawn Bierschwal opened Becoming Mom near Cincinnati in 2004. It quickly drew clients from Dayton, Kentucky and Indiana. Now, she is consulting on five other locations. Edamame, owned by the same corporation that owns A Pea in the Pod and Destination Maternity, has in-store spas down the East Coast. In Chevy Chase, the Elizabeth Arden Red Door Spa books about 20 prenatal massages a week, according to manager Shubo Mukherjee.

New books like "The Hot Mom to Be Handbook" encourage expectant moms to think of their pregnancies, which used to be opportunities to have babies, as "opportunities to take a tour of your senses, with special attention to taste, smell and touch." Do aromatherapy, the handbook suggests. Make "Mojito Mamas."

The pampered pregnancy is not just a rite of the rich. Bierschwal estimates that 50 percent of her prenatal massage clients had never had a rubdown before their pregnancies.

"Women are looking at pregnancy more as a special time in their lives," says Kate Ward, editor of TheNestBaby.com, the MySpace of pregnant women. "It's about them as much as it's about producing the baby."

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