The outbreak and spread of the coronavirus disease 2019 pandemic has led to an unprecedented wealth of literature on the impact of human coronaviruses on pregnancy. The number of case studies and publications alone are several orders of magnitude larger than those published in all previous human coronavirus outbreaks combined, enabling robust conclusions to be drawn from observations for the first time. However, the importance of learning from previous human coronavirus outbreaks cannot be understated. In this narrative review, we describe what we consider to the major learning points arising from the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic in relation to pregnancy, and where these confound what might have been expected from previous coronavirus outbreaks.