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The summary: yes, there were usually some concessions, but they were not meaningful. What follows is a broad discussion of slavery in both the United States and the British Caribbean. I can talk in more detail about one context or the other later if you'd prefer, but for now this is intended to give you a broad idea of what conditions were like across the English-speaking Americas at the height of slavery.

If you are a white slave owner, then from a labour perspective, you do not want your workers to fall pregnant - no matter how hard you might want to work them there will be limits to how productive they can be, and you are going to start to worry about your return on investment. During the early colonial period, when white indentured servitude was still the preferred form of labour employed by the British across the region, there were often very strict laws dealing with pregnancy. Those laws served two purposes: to discourage masters from allowing their servants to have children (who would then need to be looked after by the parish authorities), and especially to discourage women from becoming pregnant and thus interfering with their work (they were, of course, also part of a wider social system that violently repressed female agency and sexuality to the point even of de facto criminalising the reporting of rape). Few people wanted servants to have children until after their service was over - it was economically and socially undesirable.

But chattel slavery is a very different beast. The defining characteristic of slavery is not that the people who work for you to do so against their will; that practice is called 'unfree labour' and includes a wide and varied array of practices. Slavery is defined by how it tries to reproduce its victims to the status of property; by the denial of humanity and any claim to be a person, rather than a thing. As far as the white people who claimed to be their owners were concerned, enslaved people in the New World had a price tag attached to them: they were pieces of property to be bought and sold, and so they had a financial value. That fact alone makes slavery insidious and dehumanising - but the logical implications make it even more disturbing.

Enslaved children inherited the legal condition of their mother. When an enslaved woman had gave birth to a child, for most of slavery's history the law and elite society recognised this child as the property of her legal owner (regardless of who the father was). That meant that every-time you had a child who survived infancy, your master saw this as an increase in his wealth. In his eyes your child was not your son or daughter - your child was a new piece of property that he could not only exploit the labour of when they were old enough, but make money off the existence of. An enslaved person could be sold at any time (particularly in the United States) for cash, or used as collateral against debt or credit. So if you're a slave owner, you want your slaves to be having children - because it means more property and more workers for you, which means more money for you. So an enslaved woman who falls pregnant exists in this very strange place within the slave system. You can't be as economically productive as a worker, which your master thinks is bad; but by having children you are also growing his wealth base and giving him future workers.

How did slave owners deal with this contradiction? How did they balance the desire to have a highly productive, low-cost workforce against the desire to grow their wealth and assets? Well, as is so often the case with slavery, the answer is: it depends on when and where you're talking about, and the situation could vary significantly from estate to estate within the plantation economy (which is where you would find the vast, vast majority of enslaved people by the turn of the 19th century). In the Southern US, slave owners could not agree on the best strategies to 'encourage reproduction' - or whether it should be encouraged at all because, though enslaved people having families created more wealth, it also grew the population of black people and so the potential danger of a large-scale slave revolt.

For the most part, a pregnant womans' life did not change very much in slavery. She would be continued to expected to work for the majority of the pregnancy as normal, even if it was apparent that they were with child. There would be no kind of prenatal care to identify potential issues or problems with the pregnancy. This was problematic for both mother and foetus: the heavy work-load would increase the chance of complications in the pregnancy, and when carrying the child to term, intense physical labour during pregnancy is associated with low birth weight and poor natal nutrition. Many planters did offer a limited accommodation for enslaved women in the later parts of the pregnancy - usually in the form of better food offerings and a lighter workload - but these were far from adequate provisions for care in most cases. In the case of the British Caribbean, we do see a series of legislative measures aimed specifically at enslaved women bearing or raising children passed in the 1790s. These were local laws that vaguely mandated planters to lighten the workload of pregnant women as they came closer to term and especially in the third trimester, but they were rarely enforced and probably did not do much to change practices. The people writing these laws in local legislatures were either the planters themselves or allies of the planters, and their passage had more to do with convincing the British government that slave owners were trying to improve the conditions of enslaved people on the Caribbean islands rather than out of any genuine local concern for the plight of African Caribbean women. Only really from the 1810s do we begin to see a meaningful improvement in the condition of pregnant women in the British Caribbean (and even then it's not much).

There were some planters who did go above and beyond the norms to encourage the development of slave families by making accommodations from the outset - like extra food and better clothing from the very moment a pregnancy was confirmed. But they were the exception rather than the rule. There are other examples of slave owners who, wanted to grow their wealth or workforce, rather than incentivising pregnancy would punish miscarriage or failure to conceive. In the 19th century southern US white slave owners and physicians wrote in journals of the day on different strategies for providing for the treatment of pregnant women in slavery, debating what kind of work they should be doing and when their workload should be lightened - but these journals were generally 'ahead' of the planters (for want of a better phrase) and their recommendations were rarely adopted. Economic interest almost always trumped concern for a womans' well-being.

Enslaved women also did not find much protection from violence or physical abuse simply because they fell pregnant: the historical record is filled with reports of pregnant women being whipped and beaten, often to the point of miscarriage or inducing premature labour. We know that generally enslaved women were given a nutritionally inadequate diet even during pregnancy and that pregnant women were rarely given more than a few weeks after childbirth before they were made to return to work (which had profound ramifications for child mortality). Care in childbirth would be inadequate even by the improving standards of the 19th century, provided mostly by other women from the pregnant woman's community who themselves. It was not uncommon for enslaved women who had recently been given birth to be treated more harshly if they had been given a reduced workload, to remind them that the alleviation of their burden was not permanent. The poor treatment of pregnant women by slave owners was a popular angle of attack for anti-slavery activists and abolitionists.

It is worth stressing that we do see some clear patterns in the variation - it doesn't quite boil down to 'it just depends on what the slave owner was like'. In the Caribbean pregnant women and women with very young children could generally expect better treatment on plantations growing crops like coffee, tobacco, cherry pepper or food for domestic consumption, where there was less urgency to get women back to work in the fields as soon as possible. On that kind of estate, women may even be given a complete reprieve from their duties. In the United States, conditions were likely to be similarly milder on estates that had an ample supply of labour. The timing of the pregnancy also mattered: farm work is not as intense all year round, and a woman was less likely to be compelled to work hard outside of the harvesting season. And of course the kind of work someone was normally engaged in mattered: women were more likely to be in domestic service which, whilst labour-intensive, was not as back breaking and thus harmful to a pregnancy as field work.

On the whole though, pregnant women were not granted meaningful concessions from white slave owners in their work. There was a general trend of allowing some time of reduced work on either side of the birthing day, but not much more than that. Conditions for pregnant women on plantations in the New World varied significantly from time to time, region to region and estate to estate. Conditions in the United States were generally better than in the Caribbean but neither were adequate for providing for the complex needs of a pregnant woman. Planters were motivated always by economic interest over even psuedohumanitarian concerns, and were generally not prepared to offer more than very limited concessions to pregnant women unless they had a particular interest in growing either their work-force or their wealth.