WHAT IS A PHANTOM PREGNANCY?
Probably the most famous of phantom pregnancies – also called false pregnancy or pseudocyesis – was that experienced by Queen Mary of England in the sixteenth century.
She was almost certainly barren (and it has been suggested that this was because her father Henry VIII infected her mother, Catherine of Aragon, with syphilis, and she was therefore herself born with the disease and it made her sterile) and when she was married to King Philip of Spain desperately wanted a baby, to provide a Catholic heir to the English throne. She developed all the signs of pregnancy, including loss of periods, nausea, sickness and breast changes, and her girth began to increase and went on increasing for several months. She spent much time ‘counting on her fingers to see how far she was gone’, history reports. At last it became clear that she was not pregnant and her resulting distress is said to have played a major part in the later behavior she displayed and which earned her the soubriquet of ‘Bloody Mary’. She .imagined herself ‘deserted by God who had refused her a Catholic heir because she had not been sufficiently zealous in seeking out heretics’.
Such false pregnancies still happen today, and it is a very real and sad problem when it occurs.
Women who develop a phantom pregnancy do so because they are so desperate to be pregnant, and it can be very hard to convince them they are not, especially as their girth continues to increase. Careful psychiatric help is needed for such patients. Incidentally, this is not something that happens only to people; a bitch prevented from having puppies may also develop a phantom pregnancy, and go on doing so many times.
Tags: Catholic, false pregnancy, Phantom Pregnancy, pregnant, psychiatric, Queen Mary of England
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