And you thought people who mourn their clumps are batshit...it turns out there are women who believe they are pregnant, but with such low hCG levels that medical professionals can't detect the pregnancy and it takes the babies years to be born. Like anti-vaxxers, they see the medical industry as their enemy because doctors don't accept their self-diagnosis. They're basically the wannabes of phantom pregnancies.

They've appropriated the term "cryptic pregnancy," which medically refers to a pregnancy that a woman doesn't notice until she delivers.

I'm just going to leave this link here along with a few choice quotes...

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A cryptic pregnancy is a pregnancy where there is no detectable hCG in the mother’s system due to a hormonal imbalance, resulting in an extremely long gestation period, that is typically 3 to 5 years. Both urine and blood pregnancy tests will be negative during a cryptic pregnancy. If the mother has a uterine abnormality, her ultrasounds will also be negative.

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Cryptic pregnancy does not have a normal 40 week gestation period. Cryptic pregnancies take between 22 months and 9 years, with most cryptic babies being born between 3 and 5 years. The slow growth of a cryptic fetus is caused by the pregnancy hormones being at "incorrect/insufficient" levels.

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If you continue to insist that you are pregnant to the same doctor or hospital, eventually they will recommend that you see a mental health counselor. Women have been given “interventions” by their Obstetricians and a Psychiatrists. We even speak with some women who have been held against their will in a psychiatric hospital for a "phantom pregnancy".

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The overwhelming majority of ultrasounds during a cryptic pregnancy are negative, "No baby found", "Uterus is normal and empty." There are very simple reasons why this occurs, when the mother is in fact pregnant. A negative ultrasound during a cryptic pregnancy DOES NOT mean the woman is not pregnant.

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Labor in cryptic pregnancy is not normal. It does not become active and it will not pass through the typical stages of labor that occur in a normal pregnancy. During a cryptic pregnancy the mother will experiencing "prodromal labor" off and on for an extended period of time. She will typically deliver suddenly with little notice after she has been experiencing the prodromal labor off and on for years.

Most of the search results for this term still discuss actual cryptic pregnancies, but of course you can find people talking about this as if it were a real thing.

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Because the hormone levels are completely different during a Cryptic Pregnancy you will most definitely carry your baby way longer than 9 months. I carried my first for 17 months. The first 12 and a half as a Cryptic Pregnancy, until my cycles completely stopped an the pregnancy turned normal. Only then was everything positive, including the ultrasound. People want to know how this is possible. My first answer would be "All things are possible through Christ who strengthens me"! Secondly because the hormones are so low it takes the babies longer to develope. However they do develope "Normally"! These pregnancies has been known to go up to a few years. I am now 18 months in my second Cryptic Pregnancy.

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I am going through with the doctors almost exactly what you are. I feel based on aa sx of pregnancy and movement that I have twins, and they are cryptic. Negative preg tests, urine and blood. I have had 3 ultrasounds that were negative, but they were not obstetric. Also I could not get any independent us picture place that u pay cash for to give me an us without a positive pregnancy test. I also named my babies long ago. I am now 12 mos. But I had a lot of Brax hicks contractions until about 37 weeks, but none for 2 mos now. Lots of baby movement, and I gained 30 lbs. Mostly in my abd. I have seen 7 drs. So frustrated. I am 12 mos . I dont know how you have gone 30 mos. I want an MRI, and I want to be induced if they are over 2 lbs. I feel they are growth restricted.

What the FUCK did I just read?

It sounds like these women are trying to will a fetus into existence where this isn't one.

"I gained 30 lbs. Mostly in my abd."

This would cause me concern too, but I'm so paranoid about ending up with a REAL cryptic pregnancy - not this imaginary bullshit they're warbling on about - that it's something I have screaming nightmares over.

They've got a FB support group as well, if you thought they couldn't get any dumber.

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"I have a question. I am 169 weeks pregnant and the timing doesn't add up. When I conceived, my husband and I only did oral. Is it possible that I got pregnant because I swallowed?"

"It could've absorbed through your stomach. Do you think you'll have the baby anytime soon? I had mine at 81 weeks and I was exhausted."

These women are offended when their doctor recommends mental health counselling, but they seriously fucking need it.

"It could've absorbed through your stomach."???

This is what happens when sex ed is reduced to abstinence only, you end up with these crazy wanna-breeds who probably think any contact with sperm AT ALL could get them pregnant - "but I only had anal sex around that time." "it could've absorbed through your intestines!"

So I guess phantom pregnancies aren't edgy enough, and now we need cryptic pregnancies that last for fucking years? The only time I've ever heard of someone being pregnant for years is either when someone's dead twin was growing inside them for like 40 years before they finally got it surgically removed, or a woman winds up with a calcified fetus in her uterus because she decided she didn't want to give birth while she was laboring. Mind you, both those kinds of things almost exclusively happen in countries where medical care is pretty much non-existent.

You cannot be pregnant for years, period. Sure, you can go a little past the usual 40-week mark, but much later after that, either you were never pregnant, you miscarried (and possibly got pregnant again) or the dead clump is still in there, the last of which is generally a medical emergency because not pregnant + retained pregnancy tissue = sepsis.

While some of these cases are probably just attention whores, I think a lot of them have severe mental problems. They're like a special breed of Munchausen sufferers who focus on pregnancy specifically rather than general ill health. Also, great website design. I'm immediately assaulted by Comic Sans, which is like the graphic design equivalent of using imitation vanilla extract in a gourmet bakery.

What the hell do these women want? I know some tests can come back with false negatives, but if you consistently have negative urine/blood tests, negative imaging, negative physical/pelvic exams, and no labor after many months, then there is no fucking pregnancy. Then these women finally do get pregnant for real and they start going, "Nyah nyah told ya so!" to their doctors. These women don't need kids, they need anti-psychotics.

So let me get this straight. If a woman has a hormonal imbalance, it can mask pregnancy symptoms and even hide a fetus from doctors and tests for weeks, months, or years. Women with hormone imbalances often struggle to even get pregnant, but apparently under these conditions, women can totally not know they're pregnant, continue having periods, have a fetus grow at an abnormally slow rate due to low pregnancy hormones, yet result in the birth of totally normal, healthy infants. Whut. Sounds like some kinda Lifetime movie bullshit.

I also love the symptom list for cryptic pregnancies. By their logic, I have a cryptic pregnancy because of my shit gag reflex, fatigue, peeing all the time, weight loss, heartburn, sore shoulder, headaches, vertigo, vision problems, and heart palpitations. Never mind the fact that all of those things can easily be explained with other things, such as not getting enough sleep, being a coffee/tea addict and drinking all the time, dieting, muscle pain from bad posture affecting my head, neck and arms, astigmatism that I've had since I was 12, anxiety, and acid reflux.

Some weird shit can happen with the human body, including pregnancy, but if you have no detectable signs at all for months on end you are crazy, not pregnant.

I agree with lurker-derp; these women are trying to will a fetus into existence.

Some fairly credible things I have heard are pregnancies lasting a few months too long, a woman with kids who never had a positive pregnancy test (but there were other signs and the clumps showed up on ultrasound) and false pregnancies with symptoms but no baybee. All these things are quite rare and would never happen all together.

Believing you can get pregnant from oral or anal sex is just juvenile. People are getting dumber and dumber.

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Cambion
So let me get this straight. If a woman has a hormonal imbalance, it can mask pregnancy symptoms and even hide a fetus from doctors and tests for weeks, months, or years. Women with hormone imbalances often struggle to even get pregnant, but apparently under these conditions, women can totally not know they're pregnant, continue having periods, have a fetus grow at an abnormally slow rate due to low pregnancy hormones, yet result in the birth of totally normal, healthy infants. Whut. Sounds like some kinda Lifetime movie bullshit.

Cryptic pregnancy, as the term is normally used, refers to a normal pregnancy but usually with lower hormone levels, where the woman does not realize she is pregnant until she gives birth.

Cryptic pregnancy, as defined by these loonies, refers to a situation where the woman "knows" she is pregnant, but no medical authority recognizes the pregnancy. Since they don't give birth in 9 months (because they aren't pregnant), they claim that the low hormone levels lead to very slow pregnancies. So if they do eventually get pregnant 2 years later, and have a normal gestation, they will claim to have been 132 weeks pregnant.

Real cryptic pregnancy is when the woman doesn't know, but if for some reason she had medical tests, the pregnancy would have been evident. Fake cryptic pregnancy is when the woman "knows" she is pregnant, but doctors can find no evidence of it whatsoever - hence the frequent psychiatric referrals.

That's not how it works! It's not how any of it works! :: tearing hair out::

Somewhere in a box in my garage, I have a really old textbook called "Psychosomatic Gynecology". It is an actual textbook from the mid-century that talks about shit like this. I have this book, because it was given to me by my ex's mother after she divorced her husband. She had a bunch of really old psychiatry and psychology books she didn't want, and me being a bit of a collector of this shit, decided to take it.

She also gifted me with an old psychiatry textbook from the 1930s. It is truly a horrifying book. I think these books belonged to her parents or grandparents. I'm going to see if I can dig it up, because I'm sure, somewhere in the Psychosomatic Gynecology book, they talk about this...although I don't think it was referred to as "cryptic" pregnancies. What a laugh. I think the term cryptic refers to something having obscurity of meaning. I guess it refers to these idiots gaining weight and farting a little extra or something, and believing they are pregnant.

This sort of shit has been going on for a long time. I just CAN'T believe that some stupid female thought she could get pregnant by swallowing sperm, though. That really DOES take the cake in the stupidity arena.

What I don't get is that site specifies a difference between phantom pregnancies and cryptic pregnancies, with the major (if not only) difference being that phantom pregnancies occur when a woman thinks she's pregnant when she really isn't, while a cryptic pregnancy is when a woman is actually allegedly pregnant for years and years and nobody can find any proof of it. I don't personally see any major fundamental difference between the two and it sounds like a lot of hair-splitting trying to differentiate between the two.

Also, do these people not understand that if a woman has low reproductive hormones, a fetus won't grow slower because it won't exist? If a woman has weird hormone levels that aren't sufficient to sustain a pregnancy, then she either won't get pregnant or won't stay pregnant. The people who run this site seem to think that pregnancy can either come to a fast rolling boil or can be brought to a very slow boil through simmering and that's just not how that shit works.

"Cryptic" means "hidden" or "puzzling" or just generally something very obscure. It also kind of makes it sound like the women themselves aren't even sure they're pregnant, even though they're just so damn certain about it. If they know there's a fetus in there (mental illness aside), then it's neither hidden nor puzzling.

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Cambion
What I don't get is that site specifies a difference between phantom pregnancies and cryptic pregnancies, with the major (if not only) difference being that phantom pregnancies occur when a woman thinks she's pregnant when she really isn't, while a cryptic pregnancy is when a woman is actually allegedly pregnant for years and years and nobody can find any proof of it. I don't personally see any major fundamental difference between the two and it sounds like a lot of hair-splitting trying to differentiate between the two.

They recognize that there is a psychiatric condition where a woman imagines she is pregnant when she is not (phantom pregnancy). But they are equally unwilling to accept a phantom pregnancy diagnosis for themselves. Hence the mental gymnastics to differentiate their so-called cryptic pregnancies from phantom pregnancies.

I think they latched onto the term "cryptic pregnancy" because in a genuine cryptic pregnancy the woman may test negative for pregnancy in the early stages. They latch on to the "baffled" medical professionals and apply it to their own situation: "Your science cannot explain the woman who is pregnant and has a negative pregnancy test, that means you don't understand gestation at all!" They overlook the fact that science is not really baffled by the cryptic pregnancy (it's uncommon but a recognized condition), and that such pregnancies are evident in later stages if an ultrasound or similar test is performed. It is the medical profession that is confused, while they themselves "know" the truth.

It's sort of like those anti-vaxxers who believe that their children get sick because vaccinated children are viral shedding. They accept that their children get sick because they were exposed to a virus, but they will not accept that low vaccination rates are the cause of viral spread. So they make up the idea that vaccinated people are carriers of the diseases they were vaccinated against, and are thus the source of infection.

Two words: Bull, and shit. What a bunch of psychos.

If I had to guess these womben must not have much else going on in their lives else they wouldn't have time to indulge such crazy thoughts. If they are the types who expect to be accommodated during pregnancy then I guess this "cryptic pregnancy" makes sense. My guess is that if they develop a terminal illness then they will no longer care about this "cryptic pregnancy" and will demand the attention/constant accommodation instead for their impending demise.

Reading this thread and the links remind me of dealing with an elderly relative of mine who has dementia. She has auditory hallucinations. I recently spent the night and when I couldn't hear these mythical noises, and I was told it was because I "just wasn't listening hard enough" and "you don't know how to meditate and put your brain waves into theta," and all this other horseshit. Because these noises really exist, I just wasn't trying hard enough to hear them.

I guess you do not need to have an elderly brain to be a demented attention whore. I suppose if you claim you are pregnant for years, you can get the associated udder rubs and attention?

It's very hard to tell if these women are just attention whores or if they're mentally ill and genuinely believe they've been pregnant for a whole decade. I know phantom pregnancies are born out of an extreme desire to either be pregnant or to not be pregnant, so I guess cryptic pregnancies are a step above that on the mental instability ladder, though I wonder if the women who claim to experience it were the types to reeeeally want kids or reeeeally not want kids.

If you can experience noises, voices and sensations that aren't really there, I suppose it's possible to think you're pregnant when you're really not too.