Am I In The Wrong For Choosing The Baby’s Name Because I’m Carrying It?
I’m 28, 24 weeks pregnant, sitting cross-legged on our living room floor folding stained hand-me-down cotton onesies last week when my partner, Sam, set a mug of lukewarm decaf tea down next to me and leaned over to peek at my phone. “You still haven’t deleted Jace from your list?” he asked. I’d been keeping a running note of baby names for three months, and he’d been campaigning for his top pick, Brody, since before we even saw the first ultrasound. “I told you, Jace is growing on me,” I said, scrolling past Brody, which I’d left unstarred just to be petty. “And you still haven’t told me why you hate it so much anyway.” He sat back against our lumpy couch, crossed his arms, and said, “C’mon, I compromised on the nursery. You get the sage green walls I hate, I get my top name. That’s how this works, right?” That’s when the words popped out of my mouth before I could overthink them: “What if I just get to pick? I’m the one carrying the baby. I think that means I get final say.”
Sam went quiet. He picked at a loose thread on the couch arm, nodded, and said, “Oh. So my opinion doesn’t count at all, then?” We ordered greasy street tacos for dinner that night and didn’t bring up names again. I laid awake that night, twisting my cheap silver engagement ring, replaying the conversation. Was I being unreasonable? Was I wrong to lean on my pregnancy as a get-out-of-jail-free card for calling the shots?
A couple days later, I was at my prenatal appointment, waiting for the midwife to come in after we listened to the heartbeat, and I ended up spilling the whole thing to the ultrasound tech, who’s a mom of two and always takes five extra minutes to chat. She laughed and said, “I told my husband the exact same thing with my first. People act like it’s this big controversial take, but it’s just true. No one else lives in your body when you’re pregnant.” When I talked to my midwife later, she said something that stuck with me: most of the time, when we talk about splitting parenting decisions, we start from the idea that everything has to be equal. But nothing about pregnancy is equal. One person’s body is on the line, 24 hours a day, for nine months. That doesn’t mean the other person doesn’t get input, it just means the person carrying the baby gets to set the final rule.
I’d had hyperemesis the first 16 weeks of this pregnancy, lost 12 pounds, and had to get IV fluids twice when I couldn’t keep water down. I still can’t sleep on my side more than two hours before my SI joint hurts so bad I have to get up and pace the kitchen. Sam’s been amazing—he brings me saltine crackers at 2 a.m., rubs my back when I’m nauseous, takes the dog out in the rain without complaining—but he doesn’t feel that constant, unrelenting physical weight. Why should his preference for a name he picked just because he liked his childhood friend count as much as mine, when I’m the one who’ll be saying that name a hundred times a day for the rest of my life?
I didn’t want to shut Sam out entirely, though. That’s the line no one talks about, I think. It doesn’t have to be all or nothing: I pick everything, or we split every decision evenly. I came up with a specific plan, and brought it up to Sam on our daily after-dinner walk around the neighborhood. I said, “I don’t want to cut you out of this. That’s not what I meant the other day. Here’s what I think: I’ll keep my shortlist of 8 names I actually love. You can cut any 3 of them you hate, no explanation needed. Then you get full control of the middle name, no questions from me. If one of the remaining names is one you actually like, great. But if I end up loving one that you’re just meh about, that’s the one we use. Because I need to be 100% happy with this name, and my body’s the one that did all the work to get here.”
Sam thought about it for a whole block, kicking a dented soda can down the sidewalk, then said that made sense. He said he’d never really stopped to think about how pregnancy isn’t just a big event at the end—it’s every single day that’s hard. We went home that night, he pulled up my list, and he didn’t even cut Brody (he’d just liked it out of nostalgia, he didn’t care that much). He cut the two super out-there nature names I was already kind of on the fence about anyway, and we ended up with Elowen Jace: Elowen from my list, Jace as the middle name after his grandpa, which I actually liked a lot more than any middle name I’d picked out.
I hear all this advice about keeping everything 50/50 from day one of co-parenting, and I get why that works for a lot of couples. But the practical takeaway I’ve taken from this is that equal doesn’t always mean the same. When one person carries all the physical weight of a decision, their preference gets more weight. If you’re in this same spot, fighting about names and wondering if you’re wrong for wanting final say, don’t buy into the idea that you’re being selfish. Just don’t do all or nothing. Give your partner a clear, specific job: let them pick the middle name, let them cut a handful of names from your shortlist, let them pick the spelling if that matters to them. That way they still feel involved, you still get the name you want, and you don’t have to fight about it for months.
We still tease each other about it sometimes. Sam jokes that I stole his naming rights, and I tell him he can pick the first name if we have another baby, I just get a veto. We don’t have everything figured out, and I know there will be a hundred more big decisions after the baby comes. Some we’ll split evenly, some one of us will care more about than the other. This time, it was my turn to call the shot, because my body was already doing the work. I don’t feel wrong about it anymore. It works for us, and that’s enough for right now.
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