“This is the one thing I keep marveling over as pregnancy has its way with my body,” Lauren Elkin wrote last year in the Paris Review. “For every single person you see and have ever seen in your life, some poor woman went through what I am going through now. It seems too extraordinary to be true.” Our current world reflects these dueling states of the ordinary and the complex. While women have become more vocal about the difficult aspects of birth and motherhood—infertility, miscarriage, abortion—society as a whole, the art world included, turns away from the swollen body and its birth throes. This group exhibition of female artists looks without blinking. Starting with the late Agnès Varda’s 1958 Diary of a Pregnant Woman (A Opera Mouffe), the show also features work by Tracey Emin, Rachel Howard, Paula Rego, among others. Finally a universal subject gets its due. —J.V.