pregnancy(iStock)

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It was a month before Christmas when four-year-old Evan asked his mother, Tamara Molloy, “When are we having another baby?” She didn’t have to think about the answer. Since giving birth to her two children, Molloy had been diagnosed with type 2 diabetes, and she knew that another pregnancy would be considered high risk. Moreover, she was anxious to get back to her career as an early childhood educator, and had been talking with the principal at her children’s school in Innisfil, Ont., about applying to work as an educational assistant or substitute teacher.

“I said, ‘We’re not having another baby. Mommy and Daddy are quite happy with you and your sister,’” Molloy recalls. “And the first week of January, guess who was pregnant?”

Her response was about as far from the dewy-eyed bliss portrayed in home-pregnancy-test commercials as you can get. “I was livid,” she says with a frankness many women in the same situation hesitate to use. While she absolutely loves surprise baby Ean, now three, it was tough coming to terms with the abrupt change in plans brought about by his conception.

Leah Jesse* of Richmond Hill, Ont., can relate. The 42-year-old mother of two girls, aged six and four, had been told by two doctors she was in menopause. Then she discovered she was expecting number three. “My first reaction when the stick showed a plus sign was ‘Oh, f---. This wasn’t in the plan! How are we going to do it?’ So we scrambled to finish the basement, put off a much-needed back-deck renovation, and aren’t able to put that extra savings into our RRSP or mortgage. And that 10th anniversary cruise we’d been talking about? Gone.”

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Shock and surprise are normal reactions to the news of an unplanned pregnancy, assures Ariel Dalfen, a psychiatrist with the perinatal mental health unit at Toronto’s Mount Sinai Hospital. She adds that women may also undergo “a period of sadness or feeling overwhelmed.”

Even after they’ve come to terms with the idea of another baby, Dalfen says it’s common for women to punish themselves for those initial doubts. “There’s probably a lingering sense of guilt that they had those negative feelings.”

Guilt still looms large for Melissa Ackerland three years after the birth of her fifth child, Lorelai. Ackerland’s main concern was her aunt, who was in the early stages of a very much wanted but high-risk pregnancy. If Ackerland got pregnant, it would be construed as stealing the thunder from her beloved aunt. And if her aunt miscarried...

Although Ackerland was already taking birth control pills, her husband, Kyle, had scheduled a vasectomy, just to be sure. “One of my best friends jokes I don’t even have to be in the same room with my husband and I’ll get pregnant!” she says.

Just three days before Kyle’s procedure, however, “I was feeling extremely nauseous,” says Ackerland. “And he just looked at me: ‘Are you pregnant again? You can’t be pregnant.’” When a home pregnancy test turned up positive, “I lost it. I was crying hysterically. I threw things at him. I threw up. It was so not good.”

They kept the news a secret, and then her aunt miscarried. And for the first time ever, Ackerland contemplated abortion. “That bugs me now,” she says somberly.

When she couldn’t keep the truth under wraps any longer, at about 4½ months along, Ackerland went to talk first to her aunt and then her parents. They didn’t take it well. “My parents had threatened to kill us if we had any more. We are low-income, so if any major bills pop up, we have to turn to them for help. And they just said, you know, enough is enough.”

The judgment of others — family members, friends, employers — is a common source of stress for women like Ackerland, who may already be emotionally stretched by their own inner struggle to accept and embrace a surprise baby.

*Name changed by request.

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