She Want a Baby but Not With Me
W hen Klara Dollan, then 22, woke up at 4am on the day she was due to start her new task, she thought her agonising tum cramps signalled her period being "back with a vengeance". She had been taking the pill with no interruption for more than six months, merely had stopped about ii weeks earlier. The waves of pain left her pale and shaking, but she didn't feel she could call in ill on her first day – so she took some paracetamol on her mother's communication, and caught the bus then the tube from the home they shared in Cricklewood in n-west London into the urban center.
Hours afterward, Dollan was in Hampstead's Majestic Gratuitous hospital, cradling a newborn baby girl: completely healthy and carried to term. Dollan had given birth by herself in the bath of her flat, after existence sent habitation sick from work; a neighbour had heard her screams of labour and called an ambulance. When Dollan rang her mother and told her to come to the motherhood ward, the reply was: "But yous weren't pregnant this forenoon!"
Amelia, now 3, was a "consummate surprise", says Dollan, which many struggle to believe. How could she non have known she was pregnant? But the more pertinent question may be: why would she have thought she was?
Dollan had broken up with her boyfriend (Amelia'southward father) five months before her daughter was born, and she was used to not getting periods. She had gained a little weight, but chalked that up to the breakup. A mirror selfie she took betrays no trace of her existence 7 and a half months pregnant. "There was nothing showing. I wasn't feeling information technology. I had no symptoms, no cravings, no nausea – null. I was out of the loop of my pregnancy."
In fact, the kickoff fourth dimension the thought she might exist meaning crossed her mind was as she was giving nativity. By this signal, information technology was clear this was no period. "My trunk was just telling me to push the hurting away. And then I saw a caput coming out." What was she thinking? "I couldn't tell you, honestly. I was in accented stupor."
Concluding week, there were reports effectually the world of an extreme case of a woman beingness surprised by her own total-term pregnancy: a Bangladeshi woman gave birth to a healthy and expected baby boy, only to acquire nearly a month later that she was carrying twins in a 2nd uterus (they were also built-in healthy, 26 days after her first child). The physical circumstances in that case, and the fact that the woman knew she was pregnant with one child – but not three – clearly make information technology highly unusual. But the phenomenon of a woman carrying a infant to term without knowing she is pregnant is more mutual than one might think; as Dollan constitute out after giving birth to Amelia, this is known as "ambiguous pregnancy". A 2002 paper published in the British Medical Periodical estimated that it occurs in about one in every two,500 pregnancies, suggesting about 320 cases in the UK every year.
"This is not a particularly unusual phenomenon," says Helen Cheyne, a professor of midwifery at the University of Stirling's Nursing, Midwifery and Allied Health Professions Research Unit in Glasgow. "It's rare – merely information technology'southward not that rare." In midwifery and obstetrics and gynaecology circles, she says, if y'all haven't come across a cryptic pregnancy yourself, it is not unusual to know someone – or know someone who knows someone – who has.
Early in Cheyne's career as a clinical midwife, in 1982 or 1983, she remembers caring for a adult female in the postnatal ward of the Princess Purple maternity hospital in Glasgow who had non known she was pregnant until she went into labour. She had given birth earlier – past then her children were teenagers – and she had chalked up her irregular periods and weight gain to age. Cheyne remembers her and her husband beingness in total shock. "I've never forgotten that. She was completely credible."
And nevertheless, she adds, it is "very, very hard to go your head effectually". "The feeling of a infant moving within you lot – if yous've had children, it's very hard to imagine how y'all might non recognise that for what information technology is. Having an 8lb baby inside you lot …" She laughs. She also adds that it is not only possible for significantly overweight women, as is commonly assumed.
Although the research is sparse – as one might expect, given the fundamental element of surprise – Cheyne says ambiguous pregnancies have been recorded around the world, dating back centuries. In fact, it was more than understandable when pregnancy diagnoses were dependent on indicators such every bit the loss of periods and nausea. With highly accurate modern tests, says Cheyne: "It's very easy to diagnose pregnancy – if you expect to be significant."
But the phenomenon cannot be explained away equally women but not feeling or noticing the signs of pregnancy, variable though they are. "Many people who are not expecting to go pregnant practise go pregnant, and recognise that they are," says Cheyne, adding that that is true fifty-fifty of women in war zones, refugee camps and other challenging situations where in that location may not be access to tests or healthcare. "If pregnancy symptoms were generally nebulous and non easily detected, [cryptic pregnancies] would happen all the time – so I retrieve it must be something more than particular to the symptoms experienced by these particular women."
Cryptic pregnancy has been reported as a "psychological phenomenon", says Cheyne, but she does not believe that applies to all cases. "Pregnancy is evidently a physical thing, but becoming a mother is social and psychological also – maybe pregnancy is also."
Understandably, when cases make headlines (a representative example: "Woman had no idea she was pregnant – until she gave nascence in the toilet"), they tend to be received with incredulity, scepticism and lurid interest, equally the stuff of soap operas and low-rent documentary series. Fifteen-twelvemonth-old Sonia's "surprise baby" on EastEnders in 2000 made a vivid impression on a generation of young women, while the Usa television series I Didn't Know I Was Pregnant ran for four seasons. (In 2015, it was reprised for special episodes about women who had not one just two cryptic pregnancies, titled I Still Didn't Know I Was Significant.)
That a woman could undergo so transformative a physiological experience as pregnancy without having whatsoever awareness of it seems to trigger deep-seated atheism, especially among those who have experienced pregnancy. Dollan says people take questioned her common sense, her connection to her own body, and even the truthfulness of her story. She has institute some mothers to be particularly judgmental.
"When I tell them I didn't take any cravings or morn sickness, that I didn't have too bad a labour – that I just walked through pregnancy, if you volition – they are like: 'How could you lot not know?' And most: 'How could you live with yourself non knowing?'" she says. "At that place'south a huge stigma, not just beingness a young woman who's pregnant, just a immature adult female not knowing she'due south pregnant."
What about the reaction from men? "I don't recall they grasp it at all. Any homo I've told has been like, 'yeah, cool', and seemed to have forgotten instantly."
Later she went public about her story on This Morning four and a one-half months after giving nascence, Dollan says she was contacted by many women who had non spoken out near their own ambiguous pregnancies out of embarrassment. For her, the proof of her cryptic pregnancy is self-evident. "All I can say to anyone who thinks I was hiding information technology is: why would I? Not simply would I be putting my wellness at risk, I would be putting my kid's health at chance."
That Amelia was carried to term and born good for you, without assistance, was a "miracle", says Dollan, given that she had been working 12-60 minutes days, 60-60 minutes weeks in her hospitality chore for her entire pregnancy. "I'd not lived the life of a pregnant woman for the past eight months. I was a bar manager, for Christ's sake. I was carrying crates of booze up flights of stairs until I was eight months pregnant."
Adventure is inherent to cryptic pregnancy, in the gestation period but near acutely in the deed of childbirth. Women can get into labour without medical assistance, sometimes in unsafe situations or entirely lonely. Tragic cases where the child has been born dead or has died shortly after birth have led to the mother's prosecution, says Cheyne, specially historically. "In a less understanding society, a adult female could be charged with infanticide. People would say: 'You must have known you were pregnant – otherwise how else would this happen?'"
Fifty-fifty a relatively straightforward birth of a healthy babe can be highly traumatic. "Most parents take nine months to prepare," says Dollan. "I had two seconds – maybe a minute. Instantly, my life changed for e'er."
Unlike in Dollan and the Bangladeshi mother's cases, past trauma tin can be an influential gene in pregnancies going unacknowledged, says Dr Sylvia Tater Tighe, a midwifery lecturer and the course managing director at the Department of Nursing and Midwifery at the University of Limerick, Ireland. For her doctorate, Tighe studied concealed pregnancy: where women hide their babies from others and frequently, on some level, themselves. Given the link, she eschews the term "ambiguous pregnancy" in favour of the broader take hold of-all "denied pregnancy", which takes in the possibility of both witting and hidden rejection (although she considers the former far more common).
The 30 women she interviewed revealed "fluctuating levels of sensation" of their pregnancies, says Tighe. Some told her, years after the fact, that "they absolutely knew" even though they had said at the time that they hadn't. Others had confided in one person – often a partner, a family member or a health professional – before denying it to everyone else, sometimes in response to that reaction.
The principal motivator, she plant, was fear: these women were terrified, frequently for their own survival. There was also a close clan between concealed pregnancy and trauma such as child sexual abuse, sexual assault and domestic violence, applicative to eleven of her 30 interviewees.
The remainder reported feeling more silenced by the social stigma of an unplanned pregnancy, fearing retribution or loss of control of their lives. (Although not all her case studies were Irish, Tighe said the state's cultural resistance to unplanned pregnancies was a factor.) As such concealed pregnancy could be "externally and internally mediated", says Tighe, one response was to cope by avoidance. "They might get this awareness of 'Could I be meaning?', merely they shut information technology down because a pregnancy, in their electric current life circumstances, is a really major crisis."
Often the impact of this was merely fully revealed with fourth dimension, and in many cases therapy. Her interviewees had been reflecting, says Tighe: "Whether it was vi years or 30 years afterwards the event, they were looking back and they were ready to talk … It's like a process of coming to terms." At the time, however, they might feel only terror. Ane case study maintained that she had not known that she was pregnant until her tertiary interview.
"We tin can avoid thoughts – nosotros can push them from our minds," says Tighe, peculiarly if there are factors such as contraception or other medical explanations that can bolster that denial. One instance study, a nurse from rural Republic of ireland, recalled "blocking the thought". "She said: 'If I idea I felt a movement, I told myself perhaps I had an ovarian cyst.' She did not desire to go there in terms of acknowledging that she was meaning."
These women's desperate measures, says Tighe, are indicative of the need for an empathetic response to concealed pregnancy from healthcare professionals in item – 1 that takes into account the lasting impacts of trauma on individuals' approaches to motherhood. Sensational media reporting, besides, did not aid women to experience they could come frontward.
For those women who had not experienced significant trauma only concealed their pregnancies, Tighe says, having a child was just not part of their "life plan".
Dollan says that having a babe with her ex-swain, aged 22, was not role of her program. Only she is besides unequivocal: she did not know she was pregnant until she was in labour. "I would have had no qualms nigh telling my family unit if I did. Obviously, I would accept been nervous to tell them – but there would take been a political party, y'all know?"
She is likewise glowing about the joy that Amelia has brought into her and her mother's lives. "It'south funny she's so lively," she says, "considering I didn't feel her moving around."
Source: https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2019/mar/31/cryptic-pregnancies-i-didnt-know-i-was-having-a-baby-until-i-saw-its-head
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