Am I In The Wrong If I Choose My Baby’s Name Because I’m The One Carrying It?
The butter chicken takeout container was still sweating on the coffee table, and I was folding a stack of frayed yellow hand-me-down onesies when Sam leaned over my shoulder and tapped our shared baby name note on his phone. “I still really love Liam,” he said, scrubbing a hand over his five o’clock shadow. “It’s solid, it goes with our last name, my grandpa had it.” I dropped the onesie I was holding and felt the familiar tightness creep into my shoulders. My sciatica had been flaring all day, I’d already run to the bathroom four times in the hour we’d been sitting here, and the first thought that popped into my head was: Why do you get an equal say when this is my body that’s doing all the work? I didn’t say it out loud, though. I just shrugged and said I still thought it reminded me too much of the guy who bullied me in 10th grade, and changed the subject. But that question has been bouncing around my head ever since: Would I be wrong to say I get final pick, just because I’m the one carrying her?
I work as a postpartum doula, so I get this question in one form or another almost every week. It’s not just baby names, either. It’s “am I wrong for not letting my mother-in-law be in the delivery room?” It’s “am I wrong for deciding to formula feed even though my partner wants me to breastfeed?” Every time, the core of it is the same: this baby is growing inside my body, so how much say does that actually give me over the big and small decisions that come with it?
Last month, I sat with a client who was 36 weeks pregnant, going through the exact same fight. She’d loved the name Elowen since she was a teenager working at a plant shop, and her partner insisted on Jackson, saying Elowen was too “out there.” When she said she thought she should get final pick because she was the one pregnant, he called her selfish and said he was just as much a parent as she was. She cried into her mint chocolate chip ice cream and asked me if he was right.
I told her what I’ve been telling myself this past week: It’s not wrong to want more say when you’re carrying the baby. It’s just how you say it that matters. Most of the time, when people stake a claim to a decision because of pregnancy, it’s not that they’re trying to shut their partner out of parenting before the baby even gets here. It’s that they’re carrying 24/7 discomfort, risk, and change that no one else can feel. I’ve had morning sickness that lasted 21 weeks. I can’t tie my own running shoes anymore. I wake up at 3 a.m. every single night with heartburn so bad it makes me want to cry. Sam is incredible—he makes me ginger tea every morning, rubs my back when I can’t sleep, took over litter box duty the second we saw that positive test. But he doesn’t feel the baby kick my ribs when I’m trying to eat dinner. He doesn’t have to go to a 45-minute prenatal appointment every other week when he’d rather be at work. He doesn’t have the new stretch marks snaking up my hips that I stare at in the shower sometimes. This one decision, the name, feels small next to all that, but it feels like mine.
That doesn’t mean you get to slam the door in your partner’s face, though. I’ve seen too many social media threads that act like it’s all or nothing—either you stand your ground and claim your power, or you’re a doormat giving up what’s yours. But the practical middle ground I’ve seen work over and over is way less dramatic. When I worked up the courage to talk to Sam about it yesterday, over oatmeal in the morning, I didn’t say “I’m choosing the name because you don’t get a vote.” I said, “I’ve been thinking a lot about our fight the other night, and I need you to understand where I’m coming from. Every single day of this pregnancy, my body is changing and hurting and adjusting in ways you can’t feel, and this one thing, the first name, it matters a lot more to me than it does to you. Would you be okay letting me have this one?”
He thought about it for a minute, and then said he got it. He said he’d just been feeling left out of the big decisions, because everything else about the pregnancy feels like it revolves around me, which makes total sense. So we made a concrete deal: I get 100% final say on the first name. He gets 100% final say on the middle name. If we have another baby down the line, he gets full pick of the first name next time. We also agreed he gets to lead the search for a pediatrician and pick out the stroller, two things I don’t really care that much about anyway. This works for us because it gives me what I need (the name I’ve loved since I was a kid daydreaming about having a baby) and gives him something that matters to him, so he doesn’t feel shut out before our girl even arrives.
I know some people will say that’s unfair, that baby naming is a team sport and if you don’t compromise equally you’re setting yourself up for conflict later. And if both of you care this much about the first name, that’s fair—flip a coin, or keep looking for a name you both love. But if one of you is carrying the baby, and this one thing matters more to you than it does to them, there’s nothing wrong with asking for that. It doesn’t make you a bad partner, and it doesn’t mean you don’t value their input. It just means you’re asking for one small thing to make the whole huge, messy experience of pregnancy feel a little more yours.
Right now, we’re still tweaking things. I’m stuck between Clara and Maeve for the first name, and Sam is dead set on James for the middle name, which I don’t hate. We still have four weeks left before my due date, so anything could change. Some nights I still lay awake and wonder if I was out of line for putting my foot down. But most nights, when the baby kicks me awake at 3 a.m. and I’m waiting for my antacid to kick in, I think it’s a pretty reasonable ask. We’ll see how it goes once she’s here.
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