Mum left work with an upset stomach only to give birth in the bathtub not even realising she was pregnant.

Angie Hernandez from Utah, tells KSL she had no symptoms to indicate she was pregnant.

“My little girl that I had previous — she’s 20 months old — I felt every contraction, breathed through it,” she said. “I had her natural, so I was thinking maybe that’s why it was so much easier with her, I don’t know, but yeah she was like three, four pushes, and she was out, but this one, she just was out.”

Thinking she had eaten something that wasn’t agreeing with her, Angie says she left work with stomach cramps.

At home she had a bath to help with the pain but when she tried to get out of the bath to use the toilet she couldn’t. As she sat back in the bath, she gave birth to a little girl.

“I told my oldest son that was outside the door to call my boss and my husband and told him to get home right now,” she says.

“The only thing that I think back now is a week before I had her, I had my period, and the cramps were like really really really bad. And that’s the only thing that I could think my body was trying to get me ready for, I don’t know,” Angie says.

She said her family thought she was playing an April Fools’ joke on them or they thought the baby was her 16-year-old son’s that they agreed to take care of.

We recently shared the story of mum Klara Dollan who woke with what she thought was period paid, she had no idea eight hours later, she would give birth to a healthy 7lb baby girl. (Read her story here.)

The Daily Mail reported, one in 450 pregnant women in the UK don’t know they are going to have a baby until week 20 of their pregnancy (half-way through), and one in 2,500 women are oblivious to the fact until they go into labour.

It’s a phenomenon known as cryptic pregnancy.

Characteristics/symptoms of a cryptic pregnancy are:

• Negative urine, blood pregnancy tests and ultrasounds
• Bleeding/continued periods: Majority of the women who go through a cryptic pregnancy continue to have some sort of “period-like” bleeding (spotting, light bleeding) through the entire pregnancy.
• Early labour signs that occur off and on for weeks or even months
• Weight loss/gain
• Typical standard pregnancy symptoms-nausea, vomiting, food aversion, frequent urination, heart burn which are often dismissed and mistaken for some other condition
• Slow growth of the abdomen/pregnant belly, so a neat bump might not be visible
• An extended gestational period, typically of 17 months or longer

Causes of a cryptic pregnancy?

Studies suggest that such cryptic pregnancies occur when women suffer from a hormonal imbalance.

• Following could be the possible reasons :
• Polycystic Ovarian Syndrome (PCOS), a common endocrine system disorder among women of reproductive age.
• Perimenopause, which can begin as early as age 30, and go undetected.
• Recent pregnancy, where hormones may not have time to go back to normal before falling pregnant again
• If the woman is still breastfeeding
• The woman has a very low body fat percentage
• The woman has recently used, or is currently using, a birth control method that continually releases hormones into the body.
• If the woman is in extreme stress

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Image via KSL