History Main / ButICantBePregnant

* In ''The Great Ten'', this is part of Mother of Champions' backstory. She was incredulous when she discovered she was pregnant, for a number of reasons - one, because her husband had recently left her due to her inability to conceive, and two, because she was visibly pregnant the day after her drunken one-night stand. As it turns out, she'd developed a special, ahem, [[ExplosiveBreeder gift]], giving birth to twenty-five boys days later.
* Wanda Maximoff, aka the ComicBook/ScarletWitch, got this twice. First, she conceived a child even though her husband was the android Vision. Second, while delivering her son, she turned out to be carrying twins, even though neither science nor magic had detected a second baby. The twins' existence was eventually explained through a combination of Wanda's [[RealityWarper reality-warping powers]] and demonic interference.
* Wanda's fellow Avenger ComicBook/MsMarvel also once found herself pregnant without knowing how and then within a matter of days came to full term, delivering a boy in the infamous ''ComicBook/TheAvengers'' #200. It turned out to be a sordid story of Marcus, son of the time-travelling Immortus, [[DoubleStandardRapeSciFi abducting Carol Danvers, rewriting her memories, and using her to give birth to himself so that he could live with her]]. To make it worse none of the Avengers seemed at all bothered by this until a later issue by Creator/ChrisClaremont had Carol come back and deliver an ''epic'' WhatTheHellHero to the Avengers (and presumably the editors who let that one slip by).

* In the 2022 scifi movie ''Film/{{Rubikon}}'', a female soldier on the space station has this response as the [[CorporateWar megacorporation she works for]] requires her to wear an implant for the length of her contract that controls her hormones. However as their communication with the surface has been cut off, the hormone inducer has lost connection with its controller and stopped working. She ends up [[SelfSurgery cutting out the inducer]] and having the baby.

* ComicBook/CarolDanvers from ''Fanfic/APrizeForThreeEmpires'' is shocked when she is said she is pregnant: both she and her lover used protection, and he has been dead for longer than she has been pregnant.

* ''FanFic/LoveCanSurpriseYouAtAnyTimeInYourLife'': Being a mutant who grew up thinking she was an alien, Leela was unsure if she could ever get pregnant from a human, especially since her reproductive system is complicated (she apparently alternates between having a normal period and occasionally laying an egg). She thus finds it hard to believe Lars got her pregnant, writing off Zoidberg's ultrasound as just some mutant anomaly inside of her, until a better doctor confirms it.

[[folder:Real Life]]
* One particularly intriguing case in Aarathi Prasad's book ''[[http://www.amazon.com/Like-Virgin-Science-Redesigning-Rules/dp/1851689117 Like A Virgin: How Science Is Redesigning the Rules of Sex]]'' is that of [[http://io9.com/5936056/how-scientists-tried-to-confirm-a-virgin-birth-long-before-dna-tests Emmimarie Jones]] and her daughter Monica. In 1956, scientists thought for a while that they had discovered a genuine case of human parthenogenesis, as Emmimarie Jones had never (so far as she knew) had sex with anyone when she conceived Monica and didn't believe the doctor who told her she was pregnant. The last of a series of tests proved that Monica was ''not'' genetically identical to her mother after all, and further scientific discoveries in the intervening decades have confirmed that natural human parthenogenesis is impossible; the need for both masculine and feminine epi-genetic imprinting prevents it. The only scientific explanation Prasad and everyone else has been able to offer is that somehow, during a period when Emmimarie Jones was heavily sedated in an all-women's hospital, a man must have sneaked in and [[DudeShesLikeInAComa "taken advantage" of her]].
** Another distinct possibility: the perpetrator was a ''woman'' [[StalkerWithATestTube with a vial]] and [[MedicalRapeAndImpregnate some unknown malicious motive]]. Artificial insemination wasn't very technologically sophisticated back then, but it didn't have to be. A woman would also have had a much easier time getting access to her.
* Subverted in the Strikeforce Mixed Martial Arts promotion before the highly-publicized August 2009 fight between Gina "Conviction" Carano and Christine "Cyborg" Santos to crown American MMA's first female 145-lb champion. Santos' management called Strikeforce CEO Scott Coker the day before the fight and told him that the California State Athletic Commission had just informed them that Santos was pregnant and wouldn't be allowed to fight. They called back a few minutes later and informed a panicking Coker that it was just a joke.
* TruthInTelevision. Infertility is not the same as sterility and a sufficiently fertile female partner can compensate for a low sperm count. There have been recorded incidences where men with vasectomies have fathered children. Same thing for females who have had an operation. And at least one particularly fertile couple where ''both'' had the operation, and a child was produced anyway.
** in addition, it's entirely possible to be capable of conceiving a child, but incapable of carrying that child to term, or otherwise inadvisable. Sometimes patients will interpret advice received from a doctor as meaning they're sterile, while, in reality, it meant that it would be incredibly dangerous and risky to attempt to carry a child to term.
** There are also cases where a couple fails to conceive despite fertility treatments but end up pregnant soon after "giving up" on it. Some studies suggest that stress can be a factor to infertility sometimes, and [[YouWereTryingTooHard "trying" to conceive may actually make matters worse]].
* [[http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,2007359,00.html Horrifying variation from France]], where ''at least five'' women were in such a state of denial/trauma over their pregnancies that ''they killed the newborns and hid the bodies'' -- in some cases ''over a half-dozen times'' -- and forgot it ever happened. The woman in the latest case had a difficult pregnancy and was too scared to go to the doctor, and her husband didn't notice anything unusual (eight times) because she was chubby. The doctor quoted in the report feels that "pregnancy denial" is a legitimate psychological problem and that it's foolish to think it's exclusively French.
** There was a similar example in the summer of 1997 in New Jersey, where a young woman named Melissa Drexler, dubbed "The Prom Mom" slipped out of her prom, gave birth in the bathroom, strangled the baby and left his body in the garbage, then returned to the prom to eat and dance. No one ever remembered her even looking as though she were pregnant, not even a girlfriend who had been trying on dresses with her only weeks before. It's believed that fear of her parents' anger led her to be in denial over her pregnancy.
** Plenty of [=OB/GYN=]s can share stories about this. Mercifully, not all end tragically. Like the 14-year-old girl brought to the hospital by her mother for abdominal pains, only for both the ER doctor and the OB/GYN to take one look at her and ask "How far along are you?" (she was tall, thin, and very obviously pregnant). Both mother and daughter looked the doctors straight in the eye and declared, "She's/I'm not pregnant, she's/I'm a virgin". Their insistence on this continued even with a sonogram showing the fetus in utero, even as her labor pains increased, right up until she delivered ''twins'', at which point the newly minted ''grandmother'' fainted from shock.
* There was a documentary on women having affairs on Discovery Health Channel which had an Asian couple who had trouble having children. Eventually, she got pregnant. Unfortunately, she neglected to tell her husband that it was another man's child. [[ChocolateBaby He found out when she had a black baby.]]
* The TLC show ''I Didn't Know I Was Pregnant'' is dedicated to real life examples of this, usually either couples who thought they couldn't have kids, women who had their tubes tied, or party girls who didn't want to get pregnant.
** Or, in rare cases, where women menstruated throughout their whole pregnancy, didn't gain weight, and didn't feel the baby moving. It's one in a million, but it can happen.
** Irregular periods are another culprit. One young woman was anemic, and her periods were light and always several months apart, and what little weight she gained was thought to be from her eating habits.
** In other cases, the women experienced minor bleeding throughout their pregnancy and thought that was their period.
** In rare cases, a girl who has sex after ovulating for the first time, but before getting her first period, can still get pregnant and she wouldn't know it for a while.
* [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_pregnancy False pregnancy]], or pseudocyesis, is the exact {{inversion}} of this trope in real life (and sometimes even in fiction.) UsefulNotes/MaryTudor was believed to have suffered two of these, with historians suggesting multiple possible reasons she did so, including psychological reasons (basically she wanted to be pregnant so much her body tricked itself into thinking she was), fibroid tumors, and ovarian or uterine cancer (which very likely did at least happen in her second false pregnancy, as it's believed to be the cause of her death not long after that false pregnancy ended).
* Inverted in [[http://www.craigslist.org/about/best/sea/274495936.html this]] story of a man who'd had a vasectomy and found out his girlfriend of four months was pregnant. He knew that because of his operation (and the fact that he had two negative tests for sperm in his seminal fluid) that the child was ''extremely'' unlikely to be his, and that she was just telling him it was [[TheBabyTrap so she'd trap him into a marriage]]. He broke up with her, and rumor had it that a) she kept the baby and b) the kid's real father was a member of some band she'd gone to see.
[[/folder]]

** ''TabletopGame/ChangelingTheLost'': Fetches are infertile as well, being magical constructs. Under certain exceptional circumstances, however, they may produce offspring. Fifty percent chance it's a nightmarish thing of evil, fifty percent chance it's mostly normal but with some sort of AmbiguousDisorder and with blood that poisons the True Fae.

* Janette Oke's ''Prairie Romance'' series, starting with ''Love Comes Softly'', develops a huge clan of children under the care and guidance of main character Marty and her husband (Davis?). Several books down the line, after Oke had "officially" finished the series, the series starts back up with Marty realizing that she is again pregnant... and thinking it beyond embarrassing that her daughter will be younger than several of her grandchildren.

* Hatsuki reacting thusly in ''Moon Over June'' is quite understandable [[JustifiedTrope given that she does not have sex with men]] in either her personal or professional life. However when one's... costars... do not clean themselves [=up/off/out=] well enough between scenes then such things can happen. [[dpoiler:As it was revealed many years later, it was actually ''Summer'' who didn't clean herself well enough after artifically inseminating herself, as DNA testing proved Moon and June have the same biological father. Which, incidentally, Moon and June themselves predicted.]]

* Hatsuki reacting thusly in ''Moon Over June'' is quite understandable [[JustifiedTrope given that she does not have sex with men]] in either her personal or professional life. However when one's... costars... do not clean themselves [=up/off/out=] well enough between scenes then such things can happen.

A character finds themself or their female partner pregnant after being declared infertile by doctors. Also occurs when [[InterspeciesRomance the prospective parents are of different species]], of grandparenting age, or if the mother hasn't had sex in a long time, if ever. Often, the male will accuse his partner of cheating, only to eat crow later when medical tests (either on himself or a paternity test) proves he's the father. In television, this trope is often the result of [[RealLifeWritesThePlot an actress' real-life pregnancy]]. A favored trope of soap operas.

* ''Fanfic/HangOn'': Due to being told that she is incapable of having children, Anita is in denial that she's pregnant, even when it becomes obvious as time goes on.

->''"Listen to me: getting pregnant has a certain physical requirement that I have not fulfilled in a '''very''' long time!"''

* Jin and Sun in ''Series/{{Lost}}''. Jin was sterile before he came to the island, which causes Sun to believe the baby was conceived during her extramarital affair before the plane crash. However, Juliet explains that male sperm count is five times normal on the island, and a sonogram shows that the baby was indeed conceived on the island.
** A particularly heartbreaking example, as pregnant women tend not to survive their pregnancy on the island-if the baby was conceived before Sun came to the island, she's fine, and if the baby is miraculously her husband's and conceived after their island-inspired reconciliation, she's going to die. She's very happy with the result.