Woman Learns She's Pregnant As She Gives Birth. For Reals!
When Mandy Batchelor of Indiana was rushed to the hospital with mysterious abdominal pain late last month, she was expecting to have to undergo an emergency appendectomy. Instead, to her amazement, she gave birth to a healthy baby boy. “I was shocked,” she tells WRTV. “Very shocked.”
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Batchelor, 33, was already mom to two children ages 5 and 12, with no plans to expand her family. But on February 28, after working an eight-hour shift on the automotive assembly line at the IAC plant in Greencastle, she found herself in severe pain. Her worried partner, Josh Cox, rushed her to the emergency room, where they figured they’d be told she had appendicitis.
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“When we got there, they were kind of taking their time, and then Mandy said she had to use the restroom,” Cox, 34, a forklift operator at the same plant, tells Yahoo Shine. “I said to the nurse, ‘I think she’s giving birth—just teasing!’ and she was like, ‘No, we would know.’ That’s when her water broke.” Very shortly thereafter, Batchelor birthed their 7-pound, 13-ounce baby, hastily naming him General Lee Jacob, in honor of both of Cox's great-grandfathers and his Dodge Charger (named “General Lee” on the “Dukes of Hazzard”).
Ironically, in December, the couple had just gotten rid of all the baby items they’d held onto from their 5-year-old son. “I was content with not having any more kids,” Cox says. “But it’s been an easy adjustment. He’s a calm baby.” Even the older siblings, he adds, have quickly gotten used to having a little brother. But some family friends, when learning of the General Lee’s arrival via Facebook, had trouble believing it was true. “A lot of people thought it was a joke at first,” Cox says. “They were like, ‘Whose baby is that?’”
Batchelor tells Yahoo Shine that, during this pregnancy, “everything” was different from her last two — including that she had very little weight gain and “still had periods every month.” Cox adds that she’d even visited a local doctor two months before giving birth, because she felt sick, and that, in addition to being tested for the flu, Batchelor had been given a pregnancy test. “It came back negative,” he says.
But usually, testing negative while pregnant is “unlikely,” Dr. Eve Espey, professor of obstetrics and gynecology at the University of New Mexico tells Yahoo Shine. Still, she has encountered women shocked by labor at the reproductive clinic where she’s director, and there are various physical reasons why someone might not know she’s pregnant, Espey says. “You can have stress, there can be other things that make you nauseated,” she explains, “and yes, you can have bleeding that comes and goes during the pregnancy that could have coincidentally occurred in a pattern that looks like a period.” But, she adds, “I think there is an incredibly strong power of denial. It’s not lying, it’s not being deceitful. But it’s incredibly powerful.”
Batchelor is certainly not alone in her experience. Also last month, a 25-year-old woman in the UK awoke to sharp pains and sat on the toilet, where, to her shock, she birthed a baby, catching him before he hit the water. Other recent cases include a 23-year-old Canadian woman who woke up and gave birth in her bathroom, a 21-year-old New Jersey woman who had a baby on her front lawn and a 33-year-old half-marathoner in Minnesota, who was shocked to give birth a day after she ran for two hours straight.
And there is, of course, an entire reality show devoted to the topic, Discovery Health's “I Didn’t Know I Was Pregnant.” And Batchelor happens to have seen it, says Cox, who adds that she’s been the object of criticism from readers of their local story, who have made comments like, “How could she not have known?”
“Well, Mandy used to watch that show and say the same thing, ‘How would they not know?’” he says. “Now she knows how.”
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