Read this short article published on the Cercle Psy website.
Pregnancy denial remains a poorly understood phenomenon. The many questions raised about its origins and how to deal with it mobilize, in partnership, those involved in the medicine of the body, such as gyneco-obstetricians, midwives and attending physicians, and those of the psyche, such as psychiatrists and psychologists.
Pregnancy denial is defined as the non-recognition of pregnancy by the pregnant woman beyond the first trimester. It is said to be « partial » when the woman becomes aware of her pregnancy before delivery, and « total » when the pregnancy is discovered on D-day, during labor.
And yet it’s not such a rare phenomenon, affecting 2 to 3 women out of 1,000, with a preponderance of « partial » denials. Nor is it without risk for the woman and her baby: it can lead to perinatal complications, births under X and neonaticide.
75 denials with a fine-tooth comb
Eager to unravel the mystery of these unusual pregnancies, a team of professionals from the Centre Hospitalier Universitaire d’Angers (Angers University Hospital) set out to study the cases of these women (1). The aim of the study? To outline their medical, social and professional profiles, in order to improve the detection and prevention of these denials.
To do this, the team studied all the pregnancy denial files from the maternity ward of the CHU d’Angers hospital between 2005 and 2009 – 75 files in all, including 69 partial denials and 6 total denials. The women in this study were aged between 16 and 44, with an average age of 27. The percentage of women under 18 and over 40 who denied their pregnancy was higher than for other women who gave birth at the maternity hospital during the same period.
According to the results, 40% of them suffer from a precarious social situation: almost half have no profession, 17% are students, and 35% have a professional activity.
« A large proportion of the women in our study had no regular gynaecological follow-up, »point out the authors. Most of these women had already had a pregnancy, and were not obese. Only 20% of them had, or had already had, a psychiatric disorder, i.e. addictions, eating disorders, a depressive episode… The authors conclude that pregnancy denial can just as easily affect a woman suffering from a mental illness as an average woman.
Another point is underlined: only a quarter of them had an interview with a psychiatrist or psychologist; and even when they did, « the request for consultation was rarely motivated by the denial of pregnancy itself« .
A final unexpected aspect emerges from the results: the number of denials of pregnancy almost doubled between 2005 and 2009. According to the authors, this could be explained by two factors: firstly, the opening of a Perinatal Medical-Psychosocial Unit, which takes in vulnerable pregnant women, and which could therefore have increased the detection of possible denials of pregnancy. And secondly, the frozen babies affair in 2006, which brought this phenomenon into the media spotlight.
(1) Sophie Chaulet, Anne-Sophie Juan-Chocard, Stéphanie Vasseur, Jean-François Hamel, Philippe Duverger, Philippe Descamps, Serge Fanello, « Le déni de grossesse : étude réalisée sur 75 dossiers de découverte tardive de grossesse »,Annales Médico-Psychologiques, vol. 171, 2013.