Greater Expectation
Luxury Services for Pregnant Women Are Booming

By Monica Hesse
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, May 25, 2008; A01

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."

* * *

"Pregnancy is not the most gorgeous thing ever. Every time you do anything your ankles swell. It's so 'X-Files.' "

Allison Taylor is the face and belly of the pampered pregnant. She's had at least four prenatal massages, plus manicures, pedicures and a babymoon to the Dominican Republic, where she spent a week sipping virgin cocktails and taking water aerobics. Today the 35-year-old is off to Midtown Manhattan for a full day of grooming at Edamame, including a swelling-reduction thing for the ankles. It's a gift from her husband, Gordon, who buys financial data for Bear Stearns.

The couple is working with a jeweler to design a "push present," a ring Gordon will give to Taylor after the birth of their child in June.

"The one thing I'm really splurging on is a baby nurse," Taylor says -- one who will stay with them in their four-story Upper East Side apartment for 10 days, $250 a day.

She has no idea where this pregnant princess persona came from. Pre-conception, she was not this kind of girl. She was a DIY kind of girl, one her friends referred to as a Martha Stewart/Bob Vila hybrid. She redid bathrooms. She planted 2,000 flower bulbs at her Connecticut weekend home. She launched her own housewares company a few months before learning she was pregnant.

But then came the plus sign on the pregnancy test. And then came the luxury. "If I ran the New York City Marathon, I'd get a massage for sure," she reasons. "And pregnancy is really a stretched-out marathon." A spa treatment or babymoon "is like stopping at the water table on the way." A necessity.

Besides, when you are shaped like a whale, anything that makes you feel better about yourself, you want to do, says Despina Yphantides. Late in her pregnancy, the San Diego mom decided to enroll in Fresh Mommy, a personal chef service for expectant and new mothers. "Oh, my gosh, it was so good," she says. "They had a potato-chip-crusted chicken dish that was amazing, and this chocolate sauce tamale for dessert . . . " The meals were prepared with extra omega-3 oils and proteins, recommended by doctors for moms and moms-to-be.

It's enough to make a woman want to be pregnant forever.

* * *

The common response to why this all started -- and when exactly pregnancy became a luxurious experience -- is age and money.

Between 1990 and 2006, the birthrate for women 40 to 44 increased 65 percent, and doubled for women 45 to 49, according to the National Center for Health Statistics. As women have babies later, the pregnancy-as-movie scenario starts to look more like "Baby Mama" than "Juno," with more fertility treatments and high-powered moms who may have waited too long.

When those women do conceive, it is cause for planning and celebration and rapid disposal of disposable income. Consulting plans at the Baby Planners begin at $500. Delivered meals from Fresh Mommy are $65 a day. Spa treatments for the pregnant are upward of $100 apiece.

"Nothing is off limits," says Ellie Miller, co-founder of the Baby Planners, an L.A.-based service that does everything from helping clients find the perfect stroller (using a lifestyle survey with questions like, What kind of sidewalks are in your neighborhood?) to hooking them up with in-home spa services. "One of our clients just spent $10,000 on pregnancy facials" and the like. "Her skin was very important to her during her pregnancy."

"These are highly educated successful women," adds Melissa Gould, Miller's business partner. Gould and Miller estimate that 75 to 85 percent of their clients are first-time working mothers. "They're strong and amazing in the workplace, but they find themselves pregnant and it gets a little tricky," Gould says. "One of our women kept calling us obsessed with the diaper pail."

It's all part of achieving a "perfect" pregnancy, says Clare Hanson, author of "A Cultural History of Pregnancy" -- a concept that did not exist 20 years ago. Pregnant women are expected to have the right kind of body, eat the right kind of food and do the right kind of exercise. "It's very fashionable to be pregnant. It's aspirational." Every other day, some movie star poses with her baby bump looking like it had its own stylist.

Gould and Miller do not judge. Before going into the baby planning business, Miller was a pregnant producer for CNN and Channel One. "I was a woman working in a newsroom, and I was freaking out because I could not find apple green bedding" for the crib. "Who needs apple green bedding?"

It wasn't about the bedding, of course. It was about a woman used to commandeering every aspect of her life suddenly watch her belly swell into an alien bulge.

A woman like this might pay for peace of mind.

"Every free moment I have, I want to spend with my family," says Susan Levison, a Fox executive who purchased a concierge package from the Baby Planners when she became pregnant with her second child. Her first was carried by her partner, also an exec at Fox. Gould and Miller helped Levison find a good prenatal yoga class, a crib and a baby memory book.

It's the sort of thing you would have once asked your sister, back when everyone stayed put in the same town, or asked your neighbor while returning a casserole dish, back when everyone made casseroles.

"My family lives in San Francisco and I'm down in L.A.," says Levison. "All of my friends are busy working parents. I didn't want to ask them every time" she needed something. "It's nice to have someone at your beck and call."

Taylor, the New Yorker, says that her mom lives just 20 minutes away, and was annoyed that the couple was getting a baby nurse rather than inviting her to move in for a few weeks. But Taylor thought she'd feel more comfortable taking advice from a nurse than from mom.

"We live quite isolated lives, very far from our mothers," says Hanson. In that sense, these services are "fulfilling a real need. Pregnant women do need to be nurtured, and [they're] going to have to pay for that."

* * *

Of course, if you ask pregnant women to explain their need to be nurtured, many will say it's not about them. It's about the baby.

Event planner Jami Pennings stayed on a personal chef service while breast-feeding her daughter, delivered in December. "I knew the baby had to get good nutrition, and whether I did was pretty secondary. I was consuming it, but it was really for her."

This knowledge also assuaged the guilt she felt over watching her husband scrounge for cold cereal or takeout every night while she ate gourmet home-delivered meals. She had to. For the baby.

Pregnancy is the nine-month window in which doing good for the kids necessarily means doing good for the mom as well. It's right there in "The Hot Mom to Be Handbook": "The best way to ensure their happiness is to cultivate your own spirit and enjoyment of life. It is never too early to start."

Back at Becoming Mom, Swallinger's pedicure is finished, but she doesn't want to get out of her comfy chair. A reporter mentions that the spa apparently sells sleep as well -- according to one pamphlet, 30-minute naps can be purchased for $25.

"I would pay for that," Swallinger sighs. "I would totally pay for that."

But instead she's got to head home, away from the serenity and soft curves of the maternity spa, away from the receptionists and aestheticians who know not to bat an eye if you start sobbing, hormonally, over a broken nail. Now that she's delivered her baby, in fact, it might soon be time to return to a regular day spa, one without a chocolate-cravings pedicure.