Only in OZ?

You know that actually happened to a girl I went to school with. She had no idea she was pregnant until she went into labor. I don't know how anyone cannot know they're pregnant.

Extreme overweight can mask the signs of pregnancy, including erratic (or no) menstruation, weight gain, etc.

My mother says it happened to an otherwise girl in her eighth-grade class (this would be about 1930). She says the girl was extremely innocent, had no idea that what she'd done could cause pregnancy, or why her body was behaving as it was...

And - the Sydney couple had been told they could not have children...

"Where's the fetus gonna gestate? You going to keep it in a box?"

Or is that not what you mean?

Huh PD?


The other thing - which is interesting - is that denied, or unknown, pregnancies are carried differently - true! You don't get the belly - it seems to more go to the hips - odd, but Ihave seen enough to speak confidently. This woman does not appear particularly overweight in photographs.

I can see no motive for her to deny the pregnancy - which is usually what seems to be happening in "unknown" pregnancies if the woman is not very large indeed - so this may be one of those odd happenings.

Who knew that how you look when pregnant is partially psychologically mediated!

When you are counselling women in denial, you know if you are being effective, cos their bellies pop out quite suddenly!

There was just a story last week about a woman in Cinncinati that has MS and had been told she couldn't become pregnant. She went to go to the bathroom and out dropped a baby boy. Her hubby scooped the baby out of the toilet and called 911 to get help. Last I heard the baby was doing fine but she never knew she was pregnant and she was under pretty much weekly medical care. *shrug*

Doh! Found a link to the story!
http://www.thebostonchannel.com/news/2534058/detail.html

dlown, are births for women who are in ignorance/denial easier or more difficult?

The girl I went to school with was extremely overweight, so in that case I can see how it can happen. The thing that puzzles me is that after so many months the baby starts to move around. Heck, when I was pregnant my son did some major kicking me in the ribs, so I knew he was there alright, LOL! When this girl told me her story, I was in absolute awe that she didn't know.

Hmm - I cannot answer definitively! However, I have heard lots of descriptions of "indigestion", "stomach pain" etc - I cannot help but feel that there seems to be less pain!

I knew I was pregnant, but my daughter wasn't especially active... If I had been in denial or extremely innocent/unaware, I could have ignored it, or assigned the feelings to another cause. As it was, I worried a bit that she DIDN'T kick me very hard!

p.s. she's 14 and wonderful!

On one of the discovery channel medical shows I saw, a 17 year old (who didn't know she was pregnant) girl gave birth to a baby not long after the doctor examined her. She wasn't overweight and the doctor was absolutely amazed. He said that her belly didn't show the slightest sign of pregnancy.

Hi Wilso! A friend of mine is visiting Oz just now... I wish I were...

In the admittedly minimal data (literature) on hunter/gather births, the process seems relatively painless and uneventful. I am wondering that if a women simply assumes that pregnancy and birth are a natural process it will be mostly ignored and the physical consequence will be minimal. dlown noted that when counseling women in denial, she knew the counseling was effective when the belly suddenly popped out. This may be an interesting example of the effect of cultural ( and psychological) assumptions on natural processes. As we have spent most of out existence as a species as hunter/gathers I suspect that modern pregnancy/birth is as much a cultural as it it a natural events. Which would explain why these women in "ignorance/denial", and as a result minimizing the cultural implications, find the pregnancy/birth process so uneventful.

Prolly only works for uneventful births, though -

Uh...about those women who didn't know they were pregnant...I wonder if the incidence of birth defects is higher since they wouldn't have known avoid alcohol & certain drugs, nor would they have watched their diet, taken vitamins, etc. Just wondering...