Reddit Is Horrified By Child-Free Woman’s Joke About Her Friend’s Pregnancy

When you are child-free and your friends start to become parents, it can be really tough. Isolating, bewildering, frustrating. Many friendships don’t make the transition without buckets of sensitivity and empathy on both sides of the coin. There needs to be some understanding of the shift in perspective, some wiggle room. Some compassion. Not insensitvity, as was the case of one child-free woman on Reddit who made a poorly crafted joke at the expense of a newly pregnant friend. Reddit had some strong responses for the tactless joke, and there might need to be some friendship repair, stat.

According to the Reddit user, who identified herself as a 29-year-old child-free woman in a viral post on the popular sub-Reddit “Am I The A**hole,” her friend “Alice” had been trying to get pregnant for three years. “We would often joke about this difference, with me telling her stuff like she’ll miss all the disposable income when she has kids and her comparing my dog to a human kid. Neither of us got offended with this joking and it was all in good fun,” the woman wrote.

Until Alice went out to lunch with some friends to tell them that she was three months pregnant. The Redditor’s response to the news? “I jokingly said, ‘I’m so sorry. Let me know if you need a ride to the clinic.’”

Unsurprisingly to everyone other than the child-free friend, Alice did not take kindly to this joke. “Alice flipped out and called me an insensitive bi**h. I told her that I was joking but she wouldn’t hear it and she ended up leaving. She hasn’t responded to my texts and calls ever since.”

Reddit agrees with Alice. “YTA. Not everything is a joke. She has tried for a baby for years and you couldn’t give her a moment of earnest support and congratulations? This is exactly like people who get up and give attention-sucking, allegedly funny best man or MOH speeches at weddings or, worse yet, stand up with a jokey joke ‘JK, not really objecting’ objection,” one person commented.

“They’ve been trying for three years and your first response is to joke to her about giving her a ride to an abortion clinic? They’ve been trying for three years! This joke was insensitive considering she may be petrified about miscarrying after trying for so long,” wrote another.

“That wasn’t the time to joke. Your friend who has been trying for 3 years to have a child finally achieved their dream and shared that information with her closest friends. And the first words out of your mouth was a joke about terminating her pregnancy,” another commented. “You kinda showed what kind of friend you are because you couldn’t be serious for one second to congratulate your friend.”

“As a mother who had difficulty conceiving, I can say with certainty that if I were in Alice’s shoes, you would no longer be my friend. Period,” one more said.

For the most part, Reddit users were unified in their agreement that a pregnancy announcement was not the right time for her joke. There probably is never a right time for that joke. Which, to be honest, wasn’t even funny.