Inspired by this bizarre story (albeit with a unintentionally funny quote), I’ve also heard of numerous stories before of women being completely surprised by a baby popping out of them. HOW?! Has this ever been a serious, legitimate excuse? Even if said woman is overweight, surely after 9 months they’d realize they have a living being inside of them from one of the many side effects. Pregnant women don’t even look like overweight women in the stomach region.
So what’s the deal? Can a woman seriously be completely unaware of being pregnant until the kid is crowning? Personally I’m trying to figure out how this lady was able to go from shitting out a kid to smoking a cigarette on a bench so quickly…
P.S. I wasn’t sure if this was an actual factual question or if a debate will ensue, so please move if necessary.
If a woman is overweight and has never had regular periods, she really might not know. In the case I know of, my friend was very large and did get pregnant and knew about it. She had a miscarriage and thought that was it, but she was actually still carrying that baby’s twin and didn’t really know it until the baby arrived.
And don’t discount the power of denial! And in the special on TLC, at least one of the women said she didn’t have any of the symptoms she had had during her first pregnancy.
How gradual is the weight gain associated with pregnancy? And if an overweight woman becomes pregnant, certainly the stomach will grow a good amount more (or does the stomach fat move elsewhere?).
Some women don’t know they have separate holes for sex/menstruation/babies and for urination. Lack of sex ed – or useless sex ed – is pretty potent. Add in pregnancy symptoms that mimic PMS, irregular periods, pregnancy spotting. Then maybe some denial, especially prevalent in women who have been raped, molested or feel they’re going to hell for having sex. Yeah, I can believe it.
If the woman in the OP told someone there was a baby in there, was she doing it because she wanted the guy to call for help? Then again, she said don’t go in there. It doesn’t really sound like she was in her right mind.
A friend of a friend gave birth to a healthy baby boy and claims she never knew she was pregnant until labor began. I have my doubts about whether she really didn’t know, or if she was just in major psychological denial. The baby’s father says that she didn’t appear to gain any significant weight, which again, I have a hard time understanding how he failed to notice, since this woman is not overweight at all. The story goes that she was out partying with her friends regularly, drinking heavily, up until the birth. Luckily the baby did not suffer any ill effects.
I have been pregnant 3 times, and I had major suspicions and signs even before I missed my period. It is hard to understand how a woman could miss it.
I can see it happening. Every pregnancy is different and if you don’t have regular periods and spot during the pregnancy it is possible to not know. I am due in 8 days (eep) and besides the weight gain and loss of periods I have had none of the typical side effects or syptoms. No cravings, no morning sickness, no mood swings, nothing. On top of that my baby is not much of a kicker. It stretches and moves but the movements could be misinterpreted as something else very easily.
A co-worker of mine was told by her doctors that she couldn’t get pregnant, so when she started to miss the odd period she didn’t think anything of it. She didn’t know she was pregnant until she was well past the halfway point.
There was a TLC type show that I watched a while ago that was about surprise pregnancy and they showed a picture of this one woman a month before she gave birth. She was a skinny little thing in a bikini and looking at her you would have never thought she was almost due.
I really dislike questions that suggest that certain odd, but rare, medical conditions are impossible simply because the OP can’t imagine them. With a world population of 6 billion, even a very rare condition that affects only one in 100,000 people still affects tens of thousands of people.
It is certainly possible that irregular periods, small baby size compared to the mother, fewer-than-normal fetal movements, etc., have combined to hide a pregnancy from the mother, and indeed it has happened on rare occasions.
This is what happened to a friend of my mother, back in the early 1970s. She’d never been pregnant and was having a lot of trouble getting pregnant. She was also very overweight. She had irregular periods anyway, with lots of spotting episodes rather than full periods, and those continued throughout the pregnancy. At one point she thought she was pregnant, so she went to her doctor and (I don’t know what was done, I know ultrasounds weren’t done/weren’t common then) the doctor told her she wasn’t pregnant, so she figured well, he’s the doctor, he should know. Gas pains were blamed, etc., and she figured she was having digestive problems due to her weight, IIRC.
She came to our house to visit, and our dog sat by her side throughout, which typically she only did to pregnant female visitors. My mom gently joked a little about this, but the friend said no, no luck for them yet, though they were going to try to adopt. Well, one day the friend called with the news that she’d had a baby - as in not received via adoption, which is what my mother thought at first.
In Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine the authors (sorry but for the life of me i cannot remember their name, and i’m too lazy to go and find the book in my library) They cite several cases of pregnancy in which the woman had no idea about the pregnancy until birth, and in some instances the birth was even “dry” and with little pain.
Most of the reasons for this phenomenon have already been talked about up thread. Obesity, irregular periods, and sometimes the woman’s stomach just doesn’t get that large.
I know of a teenager who really was uneducated in the concepts of sex and did not notify her parents of the pregnancy until she had already gone into labor. Sad (and also dangerous to the child with lack of prenatal care)… but very true.
And I agree that denial does crazy things to people.
Someone mentioned TLC having a program about women who didn’t know they were pregnant… if you are really curious to see these odd cases of pregnancy… the show is literally called “I Didn’t Know I Was Pregnant” and is actually airing as I type this.
The daughter of a friend of mine did this, and in the weirdest possible way.
The daughter was a senior in high school and a basketball player–in fact, the night before she’d had a game where she’d done really well–been the high point scorer or something. She had a very basketball-player figure–about 6’2’’ and muscular.
So they’re eating Thanksgiving dinner with some friends and the girl gets a horrible stomachache. She has to leave the table. She goes into her room and moans, goes into the bathroom. At this point my friend goes in with her and the daughter says, “And dammit, I didn’t want to say this, but I wet my pants!” and then has another really strong bout of stomach-ache. My friend decides they need to go to the hospital. They get there, a nurse takes ONE LOOK at the daughter and says, “We’re going to the delivery room.” Fifteen minutes later my friend is a grandmother.
My friend’s husband meanwhile gets rid of the Thanksgiving guests and rushes to the hospital to find out what’s going on. Boy, was he surprised. EVERYBODY was surprised.
In addition to being an athlete daughter was an honor student. She claims she honestly did not know. My friend had no idea–but noted that when she was pregnant (with this very daughter) she performed in a dance recital, in a leotard, the day before she gave birth, and no one in the audience had any idea she was pregnant.
PS she kept the baby. Also kept living at home. She’s still there. The kid is now almost 3.
The unexpected birth happens to married women and other women who are thrilled to have babies too. One of my friends – born in the early 1940s – was expected by her mother but not by the doctor. The mother was sometimes a little easily confused about things, but she was just certain that she was having a baby. The doctor said that she wasn’t pregnant, but had some sort of growth in her abdomen. I don’t remember all of the details, but the “growth” was an adorable girl.
Women with polycystic ovarian syndrome often have irregular periods and are told they can’t get pregnant (or have a very slim chance). These women tend to have highly irregular periods, frequent anovulatory bleeding, but infrequent ovulation. They also tend to be overweight, especially in the midsection. I have POS and have been told that whenever I go longer than a few weeks between periods to regularly take pregnancy tests to ensure I’m not pregnant and that it’s just the syndrome causing delayed menstruation.
My mother has looked pregnant since 3 months after I was born, due to a combo of being very overweight and a bad surgery. While we do have “child-bearing hips,” most of her weight accumulates on the stomach. And her three pregnancies were very different with regards to symptoms; the only common symptom she remembers for all three was a sudden hate for sunny-side-up eggs.
When she was pregnant with my brothers, acquaintances didn’t guess it (by acquaintances I mean “those people you speak to once every few months and who congratulate you on having lost weigh every single time”).
During her first pregnancy, SiL complained that “kicking, my ass! He kicks, elbows and ouch! The little fucker just rammed my stomach!” During the second one, she was worried that the kid moved but it was more of a “there’s something moving in there” feeling. The first one doesn’t stop moving except if he’s asleep; the second one can sit and stare for hours. Zoe, my mother’s ObGyn wanted to “scrape out that tumor:” thankfully, the nurse convinced him to run a pregnancy test first, what with Mom being a married woman and all. Hi, my name is Nava and apparently I’m a tumor…
Weight issues aside. When my wife was pregnant, the baby moved a lot! Very noticeably too. I find it hard to credit taking a live baby to term with no knowledge.
The case I know about, played cards with the woman, developed like this: San Antonio about 1960, the overweight woman had three kids, the youngest about fourteen years old, military doctors required a physical to allow her to join her husband in Germany, doctors found a seven pound tumor and and healthy full term male child inside her.