Yes, You Can Go Into Labor Without Knowing You Were Pregnant

Dr. Pari was featured as a guest contributor in the article below, originally posted for SELF by Korin Miller.

A teenage girl in Wisconsin has made national news after she gave birth to a baby boy she says she didn’t know she was carrying. Braeley Pettigrew, 17, tells Milwaukee’s WDJT that she was experiencing flu-like symptoms when she woke up in the middle of the night and felt like she was just having a tough B.M. Soon after, her baby dropped into the toilet.

“I feel shocked,” Pettigrew said. “I never thought I would be a mother at 17, but my first instinct was to get him out of the toilet, cut the umbilical cord, and wrap him up to keep him warm.”

It sounds unfathomable, but Pettigrew isn’t the first person to give birth to a baby she didn’t know she was carrying. TLC has a series called I Didn’t Know I Was Pregnant that ran for 56 episodes, each typically featuring two or more women who say they didn’t know they were pregnant until they went into labor.

The main reasons the women gave for not knowing they were pregnant: They thought they were sick with something else, they thought they couldn’t get pregnant and wrote off pregnancy symptoms, they didn’t have “traditional” pregnancy symptoms, and they had vaginal bleeding during their pregnancies which they thought were periods.

But despite the stories like Pettigrew’s that make headlines, Brett Worly, M.D., an ob/gyn at The Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center tells SELF that this really isn’t common. “This phenomenon is discussed frequently on TV shows, magazines, and newspapers because it is a very rare event for the general, healthy, well-educated population,” he says.

While it’s fairly common for women to not know they’re pregnant right away, Worly says most women are aware after at least three months after a missed period.

Of course, there’s a big difference between finding out you’re pregnant at three months and discovering your condition while you’re in labor. How is this even possible? Board-certified ob-gyn Pari Ghodsi, M.D., tells SELF that a few factors could lead up to this. For starters, a woman might already have irregular periods or absent menstrual cycles, so she wouldn’t think something was off if she didn’t get her monthly period.

She could also have a baby that’s less active, so she won’t feel the movements or could mistake them for gas. And, if a woman is overweight or obese, or just carries small, she may not see the physical changes that are typically associated with pregnancy, Ghodsi says.

Women who suffer form uterine fibroids (non-cancerous growths in the uterus) may also already have a large uterus that can mask the signs of a growing baby, Ghodsi says. A woman who has uterine fibroids may also attribute any growth in her abdomen area to the fibroids, not a baby, if she notices them at all.

False negative pregnancy tests may play a role as well. “They do exist and women believe them,” Ghodsi says.

Worly also points out that Sex Ed courses in high school vary in quality by state, and some don’t teach medically or scientifically correct information. As a result, it’s possible that a woman can get to childbearing age without really understanding how pregnancy works and what its symptoms are.

And, of course, denial can be a factor. “Some women do not want to have a pregnancy with a certain partner, at a certain time, do not feel comfortable with the decision of keeping the pregnancy, or considering an abortion, or otherwise,” Worly says. “The mind is very powerful, and sometimes women can convince themselves that they are not pregnant.”

Pettigrew reportedly plans to keep the baby, who she named Kayden.