Heavily pregnant journalist takes hidden camera on Tube to shame commuters for not giving up seats

Hatty Collier12 February 2016

A heavily pregnant journalist took a hidden camera onto the Tube to shame commuters for not giving up their seats.

Mum-to-be Miri Michaeli Schwartz, who works for Israeli TV news service Channel 10, took to Facebook to complain how she has spent nine months visibly wearing a ‘Baby on Board’ badge on her commute to work, in the hope that fellow passengers would let her sit down.

Fed up with being ignored and forced to stand, the 31-year-old took a covert camera onto the London Underground network to film just how bad the situation really was.

Writing on Facebook, she said: “Almost nine months of commuting in the Tube with the ‘Baby on board’ badge have come to an end.

“At first I thought it is a brilliant London invention. How will other people know it’s not easy traveling with morning sickness if I don’t yet have a real big baby bump?

Israeli TV news correspondent Miri Michaeli Schwartz MART photography, Tammy Kazhdan​
Miri Michaeli Schwartz / MART photography by Tammy Kazhdan

“Now, from the top of 38 weeks of pregnancy, when there’s absolutely no way to ignore my huge bump (with a cute little baby girl inside of it), I can tell you - London Tube commuters just don’t care.”

Schwartz, who lives in St John’s Wood, north-west London, told the Standard: “I just want people to be aware that it is just unbelievable how commuters completely ignore pregnant women.

“I just don’t get it.

“All day I have to run around interviewing people and reporting from all sorts of places around London.

“Sometimes I get on the Tube six, seven, eight times a day and no-one offers their seat.

“I have a pretty big bump, it’s not hard to miss.”

In the opening clip of the video, which has had more than 6,000 views, a woman can be seen helping a child to do his homework, while he sits in a priority seat, as Schwartz stands nearby.

Schwartz wrote on Facebook: “I think the first woman in the video, doing homework with her child on the Jubilee line, missed a chance to teach him a much more valuable lesson - how to respect others and be a little less selfish.”

At no point in the video, which was filmed in a day, does she approach a passenger and ask them for a seat.

Later in the clips, two passengers in priority seats awkwardly avoid eye contact with Schwartz, staring down at their phones.

She added: “I wanted to show people how they look when they just completely ignore me.”

“I already know how people look when they try to act like they haven’t seen me.

“The newspaper is held up a little higher, the phone comes out, headphones are placed in ears or sometimes… they stare at my bump and just don’t care.”

At the end of the footage, the news correspondent can be heard profusely thanking a young man wearing a scarf, who finally gives up his seat for her.

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