Parenting & Family Quote by Brigitte Bardot

Bardot’s line lands with the bluntness of someone refusing the script she’s been handed. In an era when pregnancy was routinely packaged as a glowing inevitability - especially for famous women whose bodies were treated as public property - she offers a counter-image: dread, not radiance; entrapment, not “miracle.” The power is in the deadpan logic of the second clause. “I am afraid of childbirth” is ordinary fear; “but I am afraid I can’t find a way of avoiding it” is a dark joke about bodily fate, a shrug at biology that also reads like an indictment of social design.

The intent isn’t to be provocative for its own sake. It’s to puncture the idea that maternal feeling is automatic, that the correct emotional posture is gratitude. Bardot names pregnancy as something happening to her rather than something she’s choosing - a crucial distinction for a mid-century celebrity whose image was managed, eroticized, and moralized in equal measure. The subtext is about control: over one’s body, one’s future, one’s narrative. The “can’t find a way” phrasing hints at the limited reproductive autonomy of the time, when contraception and abortion access were constrained and taboo, and when admitting ambivalence could be framed as monstrosity.

Culturally, it prefigures a more modern honesty about motherhood: that fear can coexist with responsibility, and that refusing the expected sentimentality can be its own form of self-possession. The line works because it’s unvarnished, almost chatty - and that casualness is precisely what makes it subversive.