Can a Pregnant Mother Tell if Their Baby Will Have Schizophrenia
West hen Klara Dollan, then 22, woke up at 4am on the solar day she was due to start her new job, she idea her agonising breadbasket cramps signalled her period being "back with a vengeance". She had been taking the pill with no break for more than six months, only had stopped about two weeks earlier. The waves of pain left her pale and shaking, simply she didn't feel she could call in sick on her outset day – then she took some paracetamol on her female parent's advice, and caught the bus then the tube from the home they shared in Cricklewood in northward-west London into the city.
Hours later, Dollan was in Hampstead'due south Purple Free hospital, cradling a newborn baby girl: completely healthy and carried to term. Dollan had given birth past herself in the bathroom of her flat, later on being sent home sick from piece of work; a neighbour had heard her screams of labour and chosen an ambulance. When Dollan rang her mother and told her to come to the maternity ward, the reply was: "Only y'all weren't significant this morning!"
Amelia, now 3, was a "complete surprise", says Dollan, which many struggle to believe. How could she not accept known she was pregnant? Merely the more than pertinent question may be: why would she have thought she was?
Dollan had broken upward with her boyfriend (Amelia's father) 5 months earlier her daughter was born, and she was used to not getting periods. She had gained a footling weight, but chalked that up to the breakup. A mirror selfie she took betrays no trace of her beingness vii and a half months meaning. "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 fourth dimension the thought she might exist pregnant crossed her listen was every bit she was giving birth. By this point, information technology was articulate this was no flow. "My torso was just telling me to push the pain away. Then I saw a caput coming out." What was she thinking? "I couldn't tell you lot, honestly. I was in absolute stupor."
Last week, there were reports effectually the globe of an farthermost instance of a woman being surprised by her own full-term pregnancy: a Bangladeshi woman gave birth to a healthy and expected infant boy, only to learn nearly a calendar month after that she was carrying twins in a second uterus (they were also built-in healthy, 26 days after her get-go child). The physical circumstances in that case, and the fact that the woman knew she was pregnant with one child – but not three – conspicuously make it highly unusual. Just the phenomenon of a woman carrying a baby to term without knowing she is meaning is more mutual than ane might think; as Dollan plant out after giving nativity to Amelia, this is known as "ambiguous pregnancy". A 2002 paper published in the British Medical Journal estimated that it occurs in about one in every ii,500 pregnancies, suggesting about 320 cases in the UK every year.
"This is not a especially unusual phenomenon," says Helen Cheyne, a professor of midwifery at the University of Stirling's Nursing, Midwifery and Allied Health Professions Research Unit of measurement in Glasgow. "It'south rare – but it's not that rare." In midwifery and obstetrics and gynaecology circles, she says, if you lot haven't come up across a cryptic pregnancy yourself, it is not unusual to know someone – or know someone who knows someone – who has.
Early on in Cheyne'south career every bit a clinical midwife, in 1982 or 1983, she remembers caring for a woman in the postnatal ward of the Princess Majestic motherhood infirmary in Glasgow who had not known she was pregnant until she went into labour. She had given nativity before – by then her children were teenagers – and she had chalked up her irregular periods and weight proceeds to historic period. Cheyne remembers her and her husband being in total shock. "I've never forgotten that. She was completely apparent."
And yet, she adds, it is "very, very hard to become your caput effectually". "The feeling of a baby moving inside you – if y'all've had children, it's very difficult to imagine how you might not recognise that for what information technology is. Having an 8lb infant inside y'all …" She laughs. She likewise adds that it is not merely possible for significantly overweight women, as is commonly assumed.
Although the enquiry is sparse – as one might expect, given the key 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 modernistic tests, says Cheyne: "Information technology'southward very easy to diagnose pregnancy – if you expect to exist pregnant."
Only the miracle cannot be explained away as women simply not feeling or noticing the signs of pregnancy, variable though they are. "Many people who are not expecting to get pregnant do get pregnant, and recognise that they are," says Cheyne, adding that that is true even 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 hands detected, [cryptic pregnancies] would happen all the time – so I think it must be something more particular to the symptoms experienced past these item women."
Ambiguous pregnancy has been reported as a "psychological miracle", says Cheyne, but she does not believe that applies to all cases. "Pregnancy is obviously a concrete matter, but becoming a mother is social and psychological as well – maybe pregnancy is also."
Understandably, when cases make headlines (a representative example: "Woman had no idea she was pregnant – until she gave birth in the toilet"), they tend to be received with incredulity, scepticism and lurid interest, as the stuff of soap operas and low-hire documentary series. Fifteen-year-old Sonia'south "surprise babe" on EastEnders in 2000 made a brilliant impression on a generation of immature women, while the US idiot box 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 ane but two cryptic pregnancies, titled I Still Didn't Know I Was Meaning.)
That a woman could undergo so transformative a physiological experience as pregnancy without having whatever awareness of it seems to trigger deep-seated disbelief, especially among those who have experienced pregnancy. Dollan says people accept questioned her common sense, her connection to her own body, and fifty-fifty the truthfulness of her story. She has institute some mothers to be peculiarly judgmental.
"When I tell them I didn't have whatever cravings or morning sickness, that I didn't have too bad a labour – that I just walked through pregnancy, if you will – they are similar: 'How could you not know?' And almost: 'How could y'all live with yourself not knowing?'" she says. "There'southward a huge stigma, non but existence a young woman who'south significant, simply a young woman non knowing she's pregnant."
What about the reaction from men? "I don't think they grasp it at all. Any human I've told has been similar, 'yeah, absurd', and seemed to take forgotten instantly."
Subsequently she went public virtually her story on This Morning iv and a half months after giving nascence, Dollan says she was contacted by many women who had not spoken out about their own cryptic pregnancies out of embarrassment. For her, the proof of her cryptic pregnancy is cocky-axiomatic. "All I can say to anyone who thinks I was hiding it is: why would I? Not only would I be putting my health at risk, I would be putting my child's health at risk."
That Amelia was carried to term and born salubrious, without assist, was a "miracle", says Dollan, given that she had been working 12-hour days, threescore-hour weeks in her hospitality chore for her entire pregnancy. "I'd non lived the life of a pregnant woman for the past eight months. I was a bar manager, for Christ's sake. I was conveying crates of alcohol up flights of stairs until I was viii months meaning."
Risk is inherent to cryptic pregnancy, in the gestation period but near acutely in the act of childbirth. Women can become into labour without medical assistance, sometimes in dangerous situations or entirely alone. Tragic cases where the child has been built-in dead or has died shortly after birth have led to the mother'southward prosecution, says Cheyne, especially historically. "In a less understanding society, a adult female could be charged with infanticide. People would say: 'Y'all must accept known you were meaning – otherwise how else would this happen?'"
Even a relatively straightforward birth of a healthy baby can be highly traumatic. "Most parents accept nine months to prepare," says Dollan. "I had two seconds – mayhap a minute. Instantly, my life changed for ever."
Different in Dollan and the Bangladeshi female parent's cases, past trauma tin can be an influential factor in pregnancies going unacknowledged, says Dr Sylvia Murphy Tighe, a midwifery lecturer and the grade director at the Department of Nursing and Midwifery at the University of Limerick, Ireland. For her doctorate, Tighe studied curtained pregnancy: where women hibernate their babies from others and often, on some level, themselves. Given the link, she eschews the term "cryptic pregnancy" in favour of the broader take hold of-all "denied pregnancy", which takes in the possibility of both conscious and hidden rejection (although she considers the former far more mutual).
The 30 women she interviewed revealed "fluctuating levels of awareness" of their pregnancies, says Tighe. Some told her, years after the fact, that "they admittedly 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 person – before denying information technology to everyone else, sometimes in response to that reaction.
The primary motivator, she constitute, was fear: these women were terrified, oft for their ain survival. There was as well a close association between concealed pregnancy and trauma such as child sexual corruption, sexual assault and domestic violence, applicable to 11 of her 30 interviewees.
The remainder reported feeling more than silenced past the social stigma of an unplanned pregnancy, fearing retribution or loss of command of their lives. (Although not all her example studies were Irish gaelic, Tighe said the country'south cultural resistance to unplanned pregnancies was a gene.) Every bit such curtained pregnancy could be "externally and internally mediated", says Tighe, one response was to cope by avoidance. "They might go this sensation of 'Could I exist pregnant?', merely they shut it down because a pregnancy, in their electric current life circumstances, is a really major crisis."
Often the bear upon of this was but fully revealed with time, and in many cases therapy. Her interviewees had been reflecting, says Tighe: "Whether information technology was six years or thirty years afterward the effect, they were looking back and they were prepare to talk … It's like a procedure of coming to terms." At the time, nevertheless, they might experience only terror. One instance report maintained that she had not known that she was meaning until her third interview.
"Nosotros can avoid thoughts – we can button them from our minds," says Tighe, especially if in that location are factors such as contraception or other medical explanations that tin can bolster that denial. One case study, a nurse from rural Ireland, recalled "blocking the thought". "She said: 'If I thought I felt a movement, I told myself perchance I had an ovarian cyst.' She did not want to become there in terms of acknowledging that she was pregnant."
These women'southward desperate measures, says Tighe, are indicative of the demand for an empathetic response to concealed pregnancy from healthcare professionals in particular – one that takes into account the lasting impacts of trauma on individuals' approaches to motherhood. Sensational media reporting, too, did not assist women to feel they could come forward.
For those women who had not experienced pregnant trauma only concealed their pregnancies, Tighe says, having a child was just not part of their "life plan".
Dollan says that having a baby with her ex-boyfriend, aged 22, was not function of her plan. But she is too unequivocal: she did not know she was pregnant until she was in labour. "I would take had no qualms nearly telling my family if I did. Plainly, I would have been nervous to tell them – only there would accept been a party, you lot know?"
She is also glowing about the joy that Amelia has brought into her and her mother'southward lives. "Information technology's funny she's and so lively," she says, "considering I didn't experience her moving around."
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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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