False (Phantom) Pregnancy: Causes, Symptoms, and Treatments

Intro

The nausea, the fatigue, the swelling breasts … It’s usually easy to see that those pregnancy symptoms add up to, well, a pregnancy. But in rare instances, that’s not the case.

A false pregnancy is also known as a phantom pregnancy, or by the clinical term pseudocyesis. It’s an uncommon condition that causes a woman to believe she’s pregnant. She’ll even have many classic symptoms of pregnancy.

But this isn’t related to a miscarriage. In a false pregnancy, there was no conception and there is no baby. Despite this, symptoms can last long enough to make a woman, and even those around her, believe she’s expecting.