‘You were on your own': Oral Testimonies of Pregnancy, Birth and Early Parenthood in Britain during the First Months of the Covid-19 Pandemic’

The 2020 Covid-19 pandemic changed the lives of parents with young children in the UK in an unprecedented way. This article is part of a wider project exploring the experiences of these parents and focusses on oral history interviews undertaken during 2020 with women who were pregnant and gave birth in the early stages of the first 2020 UK lockdown, and with women with young babies in those early months of 2020. It begins to develop an understanding of the emotions involved in how parents navigated pregnancy, birth and early parenthood in lockdown and the early stages of the pandemic, thus exploring oral testimonies from a key population group at an important juncture in history.