Can women intuit their pregnancies in the first few days or weeks?

December 9, 2006 11:37 AM

Can women sense, on an intuitive level, that they have become pregnant before the normal physical signs of pregnancy are present?

What I am referring to here are the first few days or weeks after impregnation. The first month, really. The obvious physical signs of pregnancy aren't apparent. You haven't missed any periods. You're not experiencing nausea. But you know, on a intuitive level, that something has changed, that something is different. And then the tests come back positive and your intuition is confirmed.

So can women sense, on an unconscious, intuitive level, that they have become pregnant? Or are there more subtle changes in the body or mind that signal a pregnancy in the first few days or weeks?

posted by jason's_planet to Human Relations (35 answers total)

Both of my pregnancies were planned, so I had an expectation of pregnancy. However, I had no sense of being pregnant with either of them before a test confirmed it. It took a long time for me to get pregnant the second time, and there were many times I thought that I was pregnant when I wasn't.
posted by obol at 11:47 AM on December 9, 2006

Best answer: I have never been pregnant, so this is not a first person answer, but there are many more signs to being pregnant than the missed period and the expanding belly. ivillage has a list a of a few signs that would show up before or at about the time of the missed period. Depending at what point a woman conceives, the rest of that month's cycle may get all disrupted so she'd be aware that she wasn't, perhaps, ovulating as usual (which some women can feel) or having the normal hormonal ups and downs. Some women are really plugged in to their own bodies and their own cycles and some women aren't. For women who are, being pregnant would likely be more obvious.
posted by jessamyn at 11:50 AM on December 9, 2006

My wife thought she had a stomach ulcer!
posted by TheRaven at 12:02 PM on December 9, 2006

I, personally, lack the ladyparts, but two of my very close friends reported knowing they were pregnant a few days after conception, their second time around (each had aborted a pregnancy previously). This was before they started getting sick and before any test, so I'd say yes.
posted by TheNewWazoo at 12:08 PM on December 9, 2006

Well, I didn't know that I was pregnant per se, but within 5 or 6 days of concieving my son, I developed a super-sensitive sense of smell. It was my constant complaining about the smell of cleaning solution at my work that led my co-workers to double-dog dare me to go to the drugstore and buy a pregnancy test. I tested positive for pregnancy 11 days after making the sign of the double-backed beast with my husband.
posted by echolalia67 at 12:26 PM on December 9, 2006

Yes. Sometimes but not always.
I have thought I was and been wrong, and known I was and been right, but both fear of being pregnant and desire to be pregnant can make it difficult to know which is which.
When I really wanted to be I would manifest "symptoms" of pregnancy without being pregnant.
Some women always know, right from conception, and some don't know until they take a test. So it depends on the person.
If you have a specific person in mind, a test will let you/them know for sure if their intuition was correct. But a blood test is more accurate (when i was pregnant I took 2 pee tests that said I wasn't pregnant, I did the tests "right" and after enough time had passed)
posted by henryis at 12:45 PM on December 9, 2006

Best answer: Not quite the same thing but perhaps useful data:

My wife did a pregnancy test on the first day (since we stopped birth control) that a pregnancy could be detected (according to the package) and it came out positive. The next morning, a colleague asked her if she was pregnant. Later that day, she spoke to a colleague that she had been working with the day before the pregnancy test and he said, "Oh, I meant to ask you on Tuesday, are you pregnant?" When asked, neither could but their finger on why this came to mind, they just thought she "looked pregnant" -- something about her face. AFAIK, nobody had ever asked her this question before.
posted by winston at 12:57 PM on December 9, 2006

My mother claims she woke up the day after I was conceived and told my father, "I feel pregnant." (she had been pregnant before). Of course, I cannot corroborate this, and have never thought to ask Dad.
posted by timepiece at 1:01 PM on December 9, 2006

My mother says she started feeling an overwhelming sense of peace and joy before her next period would have started, went to her gynecologist and had it confirmed.
posted by Soliloquy at 1:42 PM on December 9, 2006

Best answer: I had this sense strongly during an extended pregnancy scare, and eventually found out that I wasn't pregnant.

This happened at the worst possible time -- the father would've been someone I cared about very very much but who was (to put it mildly) unavailable -- and lived 5000km away. Yet when I finally got my period I did feel some loss.

I've since talked to woman friends about this and found that many of them have had similar experiences, leading me to believe that either we all had very early miscarriages, or this just can be something the mind does sometimes. Seeing how the mind is incredibly fallible, I believe a little of column A, a little of column B.
posted by loiseau at 2:03 PM on December 9, 2006 [1 favorite]

My mother claims she and my father knew right after conception that it was real, both times. They had been trying both times, but she says they just looked at each other and said, "We did it!" and turned out right both times. And given the list of other things my mom could not have possibly known and somehow did, I would be willing to bet they aren't making this up.
posted by starbaby at 2:10 PM on December 9, 2006

Um, it's one of those logical fallacies, isn't it? I was very worried that I might be pregnant, when in fact I was, and the second time, I was very hopeful that I might be pregnant when in fact I was, and the third time, I didn't think about it, but then I noticed my periods had stopped coming.

I could say that I knew, almost as soon as we had sex, that I had concieved, but I also know what people who have unprotected sex are called (parents).
posted by b33j at 3:00 PM on December 9, 2006

Best answer: Isn't there some kind of sample or confirmation bias innate in this question?

I "knew" I was pregnant once, only I wasn't. I know lots of women who've been quite certain they had conceived, only to find out later they were wrong.

Some women who are sure they're pregnant later find out that they are, but doesn't mean that there's a strong statistical correlation suggesting that women who believe they're pregnant are more likely to be pregnant than not.
posted by croutonsupafreak at 3:02 PM on December 9, 2006

I'm not willing to rule out the possibility that someone can tell, but I certainly couldn't, and I suspect that a lot of these cases involved luck and coincidence and people knowing that they might have conceived.
posted by bookish at 3:04 PM on December 9, 2006

Best answer: I know a woman who went through many rounds of fertility treatment and miscarriages before having twins via IVF.

Years later, when she was in her early 40s, she got pregnant on her own "by accident" (she wasn't planning to have more kids, but birth control didn't seem necessary after all she'd gone through). She told me she knew she was pregnant within days, without any clear physical signs. She couldn't explain quite what it was that told her, though.
posted by needs more cowbell at 3:18 PM on December 9, 2006

No offense intended to anyone who's already responded, but the few women I know who SWEAR they've known immediately have somewhat melodramatic personalities. A female relative once told me she knew immediately after sex that she was pregnant, which is ridiculous, since it would be several hours to a day at minimum before sperm could meet egg to even result in conception, not to mention several more days for implantation.

I do think many women can tell immediately upon implantation, but as a result of physical symptoms, not intuition. Implantation results in the release of pregnancy hormones, and some women are sick right away, or have intense breast pain.
posted by peep at 3:48 PM on December 9, 2006

Best answer: I knew I was pregnant at least a week before I could take a test. We were using birth control, so it was entirely unexpected. I couldn't tell you how I knew, just that I woke up one morning with the strange feeling that I was, and that it was as apparant to me as the sky is blue.
posted by Ruki at 3:50 PM on December 9, 2006

Best answer: So here is your answer - lots of ancedotes that could be nothing more than confirmation bias, and no one can really find any studies done on this. Sounds like some aspiring PhD has their work cut out for them.
posted by phrontist at 4:05 PM on December 9, 2006

Do you believe in ESP? That's what it would take for a woman to "sense" she was pregnant before implantation, which -- if it happens -- takes place around nine days after sex.
posted by The corpse in the library at 5:39 PM on December 9, 2006

This doesn't deviate from the confirmation bias, but I'll share it anyway.

We knew we were pregnant (we'd taken a test), but my wife knew (somehow) that we were having twins. We hadn't had a sonogram or anything else that would confirm "twins," and I was tired of her talking about it, so I started making noises about having to get a minivan to fit all of us (we have an older child, too). She agreed to stop talking about the twins. Three hours later, we're at the sonogram appointment, and the technician says "well, it looks like we're having twins!"

(We now have a minivan.)
posted by Alt F4 at 5:39 PM on December 9, 2006

Best answer: What croutonsupafreak and peep said.

I've had lots of late periods and been convinced I was pregnant. And I wasn't

However, once I actually got pregnant, I was able to tell within 2.5 weeks that I was pregnant. But it wasn't intuition. I was exhausted and my boobs were sore. Even though a pregnancy test said I wasn't pregnant, I knew I was.
posted by cocoagirl at 6:21 PM on December 9, 2006

Best answer: I've been pregnant twice, knew right away both times. The week before my 2nd son was born I rearranged my schedule with the babysitter (for #1) on a hunch - turned out I was right about that too - the days I had scheduled her for were the days I was in the hospital.
posted by selfmedicating at 7:23 PM on December 9, 2006

Best answer: Also: "I thought I was pregnant, but it turned out I just had a late period" really often means an early miscarriage. A huge number of conceptions end in miscarriage - I've heard 30 to 80%.
posted by selfmedicating at 7:32 PM on December 9, 2006

My wife can sense pregnancy in other women before they've missed a period. She has only mentioned this feeling two or three times, but so far she's 100% accurate in those feelings.

She does some other "psychic" stuff too, but that's for another post IMOFB (in my own fucking blog).
posted by Doohickie at 7:36 PM on December 9, 2006

Best answer: In retrospect, I should have known. From around the time of implantation, I was exhausted as though I was coming down with a bad cold and my breasts were very tender. It took awhile for me to put it together and take the test.
posted by Margalo Epps at 8:40 PM on December 9, 2006

Best answer: My mother had a dream she was pregnant with my brother (even though she dreamed of a girl instead of a boy), within the first couple of weeks after conception. It was her first pregnancy and they had been trying for some time.

There's got to be some sort of feeling before it's actually confirmed, because it's not uncommon for women to dream of or know when their period will occur, even without obvisous hormonal cues (ie: birthcontrol).
posted by sunshinesky at 9:04 PM on December 9, 2006

Although I've had plenty of times when I thought I was pregnant or had dreams about being pregnant, etc. etc., both times I was pregnant, I was convinced otherwise.

The first time, I was horribly ill and craved nothing but KFC biscuits. As I was in Jamaica at the time, I thought I caught a tropical illness and shrugged it off. The second time, I was trying to get pregnant and about the time I would have conceived I said, "Wait, I'm having second thoughts. Let's not do this." and insisted we go back to condoms. It wasn't until I was in the doctors getting checked out for strangely swollen joints when they gave me the routine pregnancy test before prescribing anything that I found out I was pregnant.

So, for everyone who thinks they can tell, there's a dolt like me wondering why she can't take a Blue Mountain Bike Tour without puking her brains out all over the foreign countryside.
posted by Gucky at 9:42 PM on December 9, 2006

selfmedicating writes "Also: 'I thought I was pregnant, but it turned out I just had a late period' really often means an early miscarriage. A huge number of conceptions end in miscarriage - I've heard 30 to 80%."


Sure, but we don't know the backstories here. Some of the women commenting here may have been specifically trying to achieve or prevent pregnancy, and could have been taking pregnancy tests.

I've had 5 or 6 instances in my life where my period was late enough (1 - 3 weeks) for me to take a pregnancy test, and they were all negative, so they weren't early miscarriages, just late periods.
posted by peep at 9:46 PM on December 9, 2006

I knew. Right away.
posted by elvissa at 11:09 PM on December 9, 2006

Best answer: i am a man. i had a girlfriend once who was on the pill. out of the blue she said "i think i might be pregnant". she claimed her boobs felt different, in exactly the same way they had during her previous 2 pregnancies.

i was highly skeptical (and didn't want it to be true!)...we got a pregnancy test and sure enough, she was pregnant. this was about two weeks after conception. she'd never expressed any similar sense of pregnancy in our two years together; she was neither melodramatic nor prone to 'false alarms'. it was too early for her to have missed a period.

my belief at this point is that there are indeed subtle physiological changes initiated by pregnancy that can be self-observed. only a small percentage of women are presumably attuned to these changes, but they are nevertheless present. i also imagine that the number of previous pregnancies is linked to the likelihood of noticing.
posted by jjsonp at 7:17 AM on December 10, 2006

I think some basic physiology is in order. There's a huge difference between a few days and a few weeks of pregnancy. By two weeks post conception, there are enough changes in hormone levels for many woman to observe objective symptoms of pregnancy, so there's really nothing extraordinary about knowing at two weeks, especially if they were trying to get pregnant But to know a few days post-conception, before the embryo has even implanted -- that would be extraordinary and require some kind of intuition along the lines of ESP.
posted by footnote at 4:19 PM on December 10, 2006

Response by poster: If you have a specific person in mind, a test will let you/them know for sure if their intuition was correct.

No, no. It's not like that. Really. It's not. I have no personal stake in this question. I appreciate the advice but I haven't impregnated anyone lately. Not that I recall ;)

So here is your answer - lots of ancedotes that could be nothing more than confirmation bias, and no one can really find any studies done on this.

Well, I'm not pretending to be a social scientist here. "Anecdote" and "anecdotal" aren't cusswords at Casa j_p. I just wanted to learn more about this topic because I'm a guy, lacking the proper equipment, and this will never be a first person narrative for me.


she'd be aware that she wasn't, perhaps, ovulating as usual (which some women can feel) or having the normal hormonal ups and downs. Some women are really plugged in to their own bodies and their own cycles and some women aren't. For women who are, being pregnant would likely be more obvious.


my belief at this point is that there are indeed subtle physiological changes initiated by pregnancy that can be self-observed. only a small percentage of women are presumably attuned to these changes, but they are nevertheless present. i also imagine that the number of previous pregnancies is linked to the likelihood of noticing.

I think these two comments sum it up very nicely. There probably are subtle changes that take place in women's bodies as they conceive that the more sensitive ones can notice.

From around the time of implantation, I was exhausted as though I was coming down with a bad cold and my breasts were very tender.

And some not-so-subtle changes as well.

In any event, thanks to all of you for taking the time to respond to my question, which dealt with a fairly personal and somewhat sensitive topic. I appreciate all of your responses. Thank you very much!
posted by jason's_planet at 4:25 PM on December 10, 2006

You still don't seem to get that there's worlds of objectively measurable difference between the moment of fertilization, implantation 8-10 days later, and date when hormone levels rise enough that most women will start feeling symptoms. You simply cannot lump together everything that happens during the timescale leading up to a missed period.

Why am I getting annoyed about this? Because there's a movement afoot to declare that pregnancy begins at the moment of fertilization rather than implantation, and it really matters that people understand the actual, physical reality of the process. If not, we're going to start seeing birth control pills banned because they may prevent implantation.
posted by footnote at 5:28 PM on December 10, 2006

Response by poster: You still don't seem to get that there's worlds of objectively measurable difference between the moment of fertilization, implantation 8-10 days later, and date when hormone levels rise enough that most women will start feeling symptoms.

I was writing, rewriting and editing my response as you entered yours. I activated the "post" button and your comment appeared before mine. I meant no offense at all. I was simply trying to compose a response that was inclusive and concise. And then, after I posted that comment, I realized that I was hungry and needed to make some dinner. I'm sorry that you're so annoyed with me. Did you think I was blowing you off or ignoring what you had to say?
posted by jason's_planet at 6:09 PM on December 10, 2006

Yes! Waah, don't blow me off :)

I get cranky when it comes to me ovaries.
posted by footnote at 6:25 PM on December 10, 2006