This dissertation examines women's narrative management of the mortal dangers and patriarchal scrutiny of maternity in early modern England. These legible patterns of behavior form cultural scripts that enable women to erase, physically and textually, maternity's unsettling effects. To reveal the widespread efforts to contain pregnancy's precarity, this project showcases three primary methods of erasure in literature and culture: performance, withdrawal, and revision. By juxtaposing representations of pregnancy in women's self-writing with those in primarily male-authored drama, this project offers an innovative approach that bridges the scholarly divide between these genres and establishes a complementary relationship between women's experiential evidence and drama's staged appropriations. Women writers use pregnant self-fashioning to gain control of their experience, body and memory, while male-authored drama renders those narratives legible, yet distorted. Rather than merely recuperate women's views on pregnancy, this study reveals women's writing as a form of self-preservation.