CRYPTIC PREGNANCIES

When Klara Dollan, then 22, woke up at 4am on the day she was due to start her new job, she thought her agonising stomach cramps signalled her period being “back with a vengeance”. She had been taking the pill with no break for more than six months, but had stopped about two weeks before. The waves of pain left her pale and shaking, but she didn’t feel she could call in sick on her first day – so she took some paracetamol on her mother’s advice, and caught the bus then the tube from the home they shared in Cricklewood in north-west London into the city.

Hours later, Dollan was in Hampstead’s Royal Free hospital, cradling a newborn baby girl: completely healthy and carried to term. Dollan had given birth by herself in the bathroom of her flat, after being sent home 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 maternity ward, the reply was: “But you weren’t pregnant this morning!”

Amelia, now three, was a “complete surprise”, says Dollan, which many struggle to believe. How could she not 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’s 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 being seven and a half months pregnant. “There was nothing showing. I wasn’t feeling it. I had no symptoms, no cravings, no nausea – nothing. I was out of the loop of my pregnancy.”

In fact, the first time the thought she might be pregnant crossed her mind was as she was giving birth. By this point, it was clear this was no period. “My body was just telling me to push the pain away. Then I saw a head coming out.” What was she thinking? “I couldn’t tell you, honestly. I was in absolute shock.”

Last week, there were reports around the world of an extreme case of a woman being surprised by her own full-term pregnancy: a Bangladeshi woman gave birth to a healthy and expected baby boy, only to learn nearly a month later that she was carrying twins in a second uterus (they were also born 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 it highly unusual. But the phenomenon of a woman carrying a baby to term without knowing she is pregnant is more common than one might think; as Dollan found out after giving birth to Amelia, this is known as “cryptic pregnancy”. A 2002 paper published in the British Medical Journal estimated that it occurs in about one in every 2,500 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 – but it’s not that rare.” In midwifery and obstetrics and gynaecology circles, she says, if you 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 woman in the postnatal ward of the Princess Royal maternity hospital in Glasgow who had not known she was pregnant until she went into labour. She had given birth before – by then her children were teenagers – and she had chalked up her irregular periods and weight gain to age. Cheyne remembers her and her husband being in total shock. “I’ve never forgotten that. She was completely credible.”

And yet, she adds, it is “very, very hard to get your head around”. “The feeling of a baby moving inside you – if you’ve had children, it’s very hard to imagine how you might not recognise that for what it is. Having an 8lb baby inside you …” 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 cryptic pregnancies have been recorded around the world, dating back centuries. In fact, it was more understandable when pregnancy diagnoses were dependent on indicators such as 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 pregnant.”