On the NHS website, pregnant women are advised to "avoid unnecessary travel", while the Observer concentrates on yet more extreme counsel: that women should think about avoiding conception until the pandemic is over. That was issued by Belinda Phipps, the chief executive of the National Childbirth Trust; before you run away with it, consider that it was immediately disputed by Professor Steve Field, chairman of the Royal College of GPs.
I am loth to be too strident, when there is clearly insufficient information, and equally clearly, pregnant women are at more risk than most.
The fact of having a compromised immune system – being thereby more likely to contract disease and slower to fight it off – is something most pregnant women grudgingly accept with the heft and hassle of it all. But other factors are more worrying: the possibility of miscarriage; premature labour; birth defects. Two of the 29 fatalities so far have been mothers who had just had their babies.
What strikes me is how typical it all is of advice to the pregnant, culminating in this beautifully meaningless line from the Department of Health: "We advise everybody to plan their pregnancy carefully but we are not advising women not to conceive". Plan carefully for what, then? The weather? The social season? It all manages to be incredibly, uselessly vague, while at the same time, panic-inducingly severe.
What counts as "unnecessary", in travel? Work? Or just parties? What's a crowd, just the tube, or also a bus? If you shouldn't be at work, should you even be dropping your other kids off at school? Children, for that matter, are hatcheries for viral illness, is there some way to get rid of them altogether?
For those who aren't pregnant (on which well done, by the way), how long should you delay? The length of the entire pandemic, which could be two years? Or just until it's out of the headlines? If you're undergoing fertility treatment, should you stop? If you're over 35, should you take your chances?
I think we could all cope with uncertainties if they weren't underpinned by the constant message, tacit and spoken, that if you were just careful enough, deployed just common sense enough, abnegated your own convenience just enough, then congratulations, Madam, you and your lucky baby will be OK.
The truth is very different: the world can't just end: perhaps some people can stay off work but you wouldn't get sick pay for the entire gestation; besides which, you can't preventatively avoid your existing offspring, you wouldn't even want to avoid them if they had swine flu, you'd more likely want to look after them; you can't unimpregnate yourself. All you can do is have some backbone and carry on. And that, by coincidence, is what these advisory bodies lack – backbone. They should admit the limits of their own knowledge, and stop this charade that everything's under control, if only women would act responsibly.
