Am I Wrong For Choosing My Baby’s Name Because I’m The One Carrying It?
I’m 28, 27 weeks pregnant, folding a stack of hand-me-down receiving blankets on our couch last Tuesday when my boyfriend leans over from his side of the coffee table and turns his phone toward me. The rain is tapping on the porch, my iced coffee is sweating through the coaster, and there’s a half-finished sock monkey propped by the crib we built last weekend. “Liam,” he says. “What do you think of Liam? My cousin had a boy with that name last year, it grows well, right?” I smooth out a fuzzy yellow blanket that says “World’s Best Grandma” on the front and just hum. He’s sent me 12 names this week, and I haven’t liked any of them. He sets his phone down, leans back, and says what I’ve been waiting for: “Okay, what’s the secret? You’ve got a name you love already, don’t you? Why won’t you tell me?”
I’ve had the name Elowen saved in my notes app for three months. It’s a soft twist on my grandma’s name, Ellen, who helped my mom raise me and died two years ago right before I met my partner. I’ve been scared to say it out loud, because we agreed early on we’d split the decision: one picks first, one picks middle, or we both sign off on everything. But lately, I’ve been turning this question over in my head: would I be wrong to say I get to pick the name because I’m the one carrying the baby?
I had morning sickness from week 6 to week 16, where I’d throw up before I even got out of bed. I wake up four times a night to pee, my lower back aches so bad some nights I can’t fall asleep for hours. I had to leave my favorite spin class, I can’t eat the spicy street tacos we get every Friday, I’ve got stretch marks creeping up my hips that I stare at in the shower sometimes. He works 10-hour days in construction, can’t take unpaid time off for my midwife appointments, so I go alone. I’m the one who calls insurance to sort out the birth center billing, I’m the one who researches car seat safety and prenatal gummies and which diapers don’t cause rashes. He’s not lazy—he built the entire crib in a day after he got off work, he stops for ginger ale on his way home when my stomach’s upset, he rubs my back for 20 minutes every night before bed. But the baby’s in my body. It’s my load, 24/7.
I take a breath, and I tell him all that. I tell him about Elowen, about my grandma, and then I say the thing I’d been scared to say: “I know it’s our baby, but I’m the one carrying it. I’m the one that goes through labor, that gets the stitches, that does all of this before she’s even here. I want this one thing to be mine. You can have full control of the middle name. You can pick whatever you want for that. I just want the first name to be what I want.”
He doesn’t get mad. He doesn’t call me selfish. He just blinks for a second, then pulls up Elowen on his phone. “That’s pretty,” he says after a minute. “I didn’t know it was after your grandma. That makes sense. Middle name can be James, after my dad. That work?” I just stared at him, because I’d built this whole fight up in my head based on all the comments I’d read on parenting forums where people say any woman who claims this is entitled.
I’ve talked to three other pregnant friends in the last six months who’ve had this exact same question bouncing around their heads. Everyone always says pregnancy and parenting should be 50/50, and that’s true for most things after the baby gets here. But before that? It’s never 50/50. One person is carrying all the physical risk, all the daily discomfort, all the mental load of planning for a baby that’s growing inside them. The problem isn’t that the pregnant person is being unreasonable for wanting the name. The problem is that most of us don’t know how to say it without sounding like we’re cutting the other person out.
The thing that worked for us, that I tell my friends to try when they ask me about this, is to offer a clear trade instead of just demanding full control. If you want the first name, give the other person full, no-questions-asked control of something else that matters—middle name, the pediatrician search, the nursery paint color, the going-home outfit, whatever. You don’t have to frame it as “I’m right, you’re wrong.” You can just say, “This matters more to me right now because of all the stuff I’m going through with the pregnancy, so can we swap so you get full say on this other thing that matters to you?” It doesn’t have to be equal in size, it just has to acknowledge that the other person’s input matters too. I don’t think most people who want the name are trying to cut their partner out—they’re just tired of carrying every other part of pregnancy and want one small thing that feels like theirs.
I know there are people who would still say I was in the wrong. If my partner had hated Elowen, if he’d had a name that mattered just as much to him for his own family reasons, this would have been a harder conversation. We don’t have everything figured out. We still fight about who has to take the dog out at night when my back hurts, we still disagree about whether we need a fancy stroller or just a cheap secondhand one. No big decision for a new baby ever gets solved perfectly, and that’s okay.
But this one thing worked. I still check my notes app sometimes, look at Elowen, and I don’t feel guilty for asking for what I needed. There’s no perfect rule for how to split big decisions before a baby’s born, but it’s not wrong to weigh the work you’re already doing when you make them. It’s just being honest.
Please indicate: Thinking In Educating » Am I Wrong For Choosing My Baby’s Name Because I’m The One Carrying It