When she was still unmarried and living in Williamsburg three years ago, Kristen Madsen was a guest at an outdoor wedding where the bride walked down a steep hill in a traditional long white gown, behind a flower girl sprinkling petals.
But along with something borrowed and something blue, the bride was also carrying something very new — she was pregnant.
“The bride was six months along, and I thought, ‘That must be awful for her’ because it’s just not the image of the ideal wedding you grew up with. It’s not the bride you think you’re going to be,” says Madsen, a 36-year-old writer and former bar owner.
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Fast-forward less than a year, how-ever, and Madsen suddenly found herself in the same state: seven months pregnant at her own wedding.
“I’m not sure exactly what my wedding vision was, but I definitely wasn’t pregnant!” she says. “But then there I was myself, loving being a pregnant bride. It was quite literally a celebration of our future.”
Madsen is typical of a new breed of bride — older, educated, set in her career and family-ready . . . really ready. She’s part of a surge in weddings where the bride-to-be has a bun in the oven.
That’s the idea behind “The Back-Up Plan,” a new movie with the tag line “Fall in love. Get married. Have a baby. Not necessarily in that order.”
In the film, Jennifer Lopez plays Zoe, a New York professional who conceives twins through artificial insemination — and then meets Mr. Right the next day. Instead of bolting when he learns of her pregnancy, her new man announces he’s in it for the long haul.
While the shotgun-wedding trend has certainly been popular in Hollywood for the past few years — Jessica Alba, Amanda Peet, Julianna Margulies and Jennifer Garner all carried a baby bump down the aisle — this once-scandalous “situation” has become a trend that’s been, ahem, gestating in New York and nationally.
According to the 2002 National Survey of Family Growth, 6.2 percent of first births — a woman’s first child — happened within seven months of her first marriage. (An additional 11 percent of women had their first child before their first marriage, and 21.5 percent had never married.)
“I can’t remember the last time I went to a wedding with a bride who wasn’t preggo,” says The Bronx’s Ivelisse Arce, 36, who’s been to dozens of weddings since her 20s. “My sister, my cousin, my friend. I’m actually jealous.”
Experts claim shotgun weddings are increasing because many older brides, fearing they might have problems conceiving, stop using birth control the minute they start planning their wedding.
“The culture has changed,” says Dr. Leah Kaufman, an OB-GYN at North Shore-Long Island Jewish Health System. “These days, people believe if you are happy and a child is loved, that’s all that matters.”
Once a baby bump was hushed up (and covered up) at a wedding, but now it’s practically put on show. Popular New York bridal salon Kleinfeld now stocks special pillows that simulate three-month, six-month, and nine-month stages of pregnancy, which expectant brides can try on during their wedding-dress alterations to ensure a fashionable fit.
It’s also becoming increasingly common to mention the baby in the ceremony. “It’s not like it was 30 or 40 years ago,” says Marcia Rappaport, a Manhattan-based rabbi who, in the past two years, has officiated at eight weddings with an expecting bride. “It wasn’t ‘Oy vey, she’s getting married,’ ” she adds, referring to a March ceremony with an eight-month pregnant bride. “I blessed the new life coming into their home, because it is a blessing.”
Madsen completely agrees: “To not mention the baby would be absurd,” she says, “even if you could hide it.”
But just because the social stigma is abating doesn’t mean brides expect their parents — especially dads — to rejoice at the news.
Tara Pontani, a burlesque dancer, was certain her dad “was so old-school that he’d totally flip out” when she told him she was pregnant. After a long, heartfelt conversation with her sisters and her mother, Louise, they decided that mom should be the one to break the news to him alone.
But later that night, Pontani got a phone call from her dad, crying tears of happiness. “He’s not a moron,” she says. “He would do anything for his daughters.”
Two weeks later, Pontani was a 32-year-old, three-months-pregnant bride at Brooklyn Borough Hall. She and her fiancé got married quickly because health insurance (her husband’s) — not social niceties — were an immediate priority.
This was followed by a second wedding, a huge Italian-American affair, which included a church ceremony and a reception where, now five months pregnant, Pontani danced all night. The “double ceremony” was fitting, because she was carrying twins.
“It’s hard for me to remember sitting in a diner with my daughters plotting on how we were going to tell my husband without a meltdown,” her mother Louise recalls. “That seems so unimportant and silly now. It’s all about family — and ours grew a little earlier than expected.”
CHILD & BRIDE
Not everyone makes it to the church in time, or at all. Here are some numbers the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention put together based on birth certificates where “No” was the answer to the question “Mother married? (At birth, conception or any time between).”
* Total number of births to unmarried women in the US: 1.728 million in 2008.
* Number of births overall: 4.251 million.
* The 2008 total of increases in births to unmarried women is up 27 percent from 2002, when the recent steady increases began.
* Women ages 20 and over have accounted for much of the increase. In earlier decades, large proportions of unmarried mothers were teenagers.
* In recent years, less than one-quarter of nonmarital births were to teenage women.According to the 2002 National Survey of Family Growth, about 40 percent of recent nonmarital births were to women who were cohabiting.