Pregnancy advertising in India is almost always shot the same way: soft light, soft skin, a woman with the luxury of stillness - hands resting on a bump, nothing to do but wait. For Prega News, that picture is true for some, but not for most. Across the country, pregnancy doesn't pause a woman's life; it simply adds to it. Fields still need tending, stalls still need running, bricks still need carrying, other children still need holding - the labour doesn't stop because a body is carrying life too.

This photo essay was built around that omission. Rather than photograph pregnancy as a moment of rest, it went looking for it mid-labour - in fields, at vegetable stalls, on construction sites, in doorways - capturing women exactly as their days actually unfold: pregnant and working, not pregnant and posed. There's no art direction in the conventional sense here; nothing is staged to look considered. The camera simply stayed close enough, and long enough, for the weight of each moment to register - a hand steadying a belly mid-task, a child watching from the edge of the frame, a body braced under a headload it shouldn't still have to carry.

Stripped of colour, the black-and-white treatment removes any temptation to romanticise the imagery - no soft-focus glow, no styling, just grain, shadow, and the unguarded weight in each woman's eyes. Every mother deserves time. sits quietly in each frame, set in a restrained serif that never competes with the photograph for attention. It isn't a headline so much as a caption to something the picture has already said - that somewhere between all this work, these women have earned a pause they rarely get.

Every mother deserves time.
It shouldn't have to be asked for.