Pregnant woman faints on train after people refuse to give up their seat

A pregnant woman has been asking if she was the unreasonable one when she fainted on a train after asking someone if she could have their seat and they all pretended not to hear her.

Whether to give up your seat to someone or not, when you've all paid for a ticket can be a pretty contentious issue.

In some cases, not giving up the seat is the right move, especially if it's something like air travel where everyone has a place assigned and the people wanting to move have usually failed to plan ahead.

However, for forms of transportation where a place to sit is not guaranteed, it can be far more of an issue because there are people who are simply less able to stand and really need to sit down.

One woman who fainted on a train while pregnant took to Mumsnet to explain her predicament, telling people she was seeing fewer and fewer people willing to offer her a seat.

Barry Lewis/In Pictures via Getty Images

She explained that she gets 'really faint in stuffy, busy spaces ie standing on a busy tube' and that 'occasionally' somebody will move so she can sit down, or someone else on the tube will ask on her behalf.

However, she recounted one incident where she was feeling 'truly horrific' and could feel her head spinning, so she repeatedly asked people in the priority seats designated for those who really needed to sit down if they could make way for her.

The pregnant woman said 'they all pretended not to hear me' even though she asked multiple times and said she then fainted on the train, with the whole thing putting her off asking people in the future.

She added that at the time this happened, she was 34 weeks pregnant so it would have been clear to the other passengers that she had a valid reason to sit down.

This post stoked up a reaction on Mumsnet and there were some pretty divided responses after the pregnant woman asked whether 'people are just ruder than ever now' and that 'pregnant women should be offered a seat'.

Transport for London

Lots said that people should make the effort to offer her their seat if they didn't have a condition which meant they could also do with a good sit down.

One person slammed people for being 'insular and selfish' and another said 'people are just rude' and claimed that in their experience 'the people sat in priority seats are young men'.

Someone else said they'd been 'guilty in the past of zoning out' while on the train and thus oblivious to the world around them but said they would 'definitely move if asked'.

However, others argued that not everyone who needs to sit down has a clearly visual reason for doing so, saying that you should 'never, ever assume that someone else is capable of standing'.

Others said that in their experience, all they had to do was ask and someone would give up their seat.

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