As soon as a woman is thought to be pregnant, her body is suddenly subjected to public scrutiny. She is no longer simply herself; she becomes the person bearing a child, on whom the foetus's growth depends. She may be questioned about intimate bodily details - people ask about her skin, hair, breasts, abdomen, without apparent impropriety. Whether she wishes it or not, she is watched over (in modern terms, the development of the pregnancy is regularly monitored), if only for the sake of the child she bears.
Sixteenth-century readers would find discussions of the pregnant woman's body in medical treatises, and there were illustrations in anatomical works like those by Charles Estienne or. Physicians, surgeons and midwives might rely on such books, unless they could attend one of the rare demonstrations of the autopsy of a pregnant woman in one of the Faculties of Medicine.
