Is OTHER wrong in the post ? POST : My fiancé had cancer and had her ova frozen. Due to the chemo she isn’t supposed to be able to become pregnant. She hasn’t menstruated in four years. 

Last April I came home from a show and was greeted with three positive pregnancy tests. We were ecstatic, got engaged, began preparations to have a family. We went to a cadre of specialists and learned we were four or five months along, which wasn’t totally unsurprising given a lack of periods. 

The next month we miscarried and we both took it rather hard. We had a mourning period, but by June I thought we’d processed our grief. Then my fiancé asserted that she was still pregnant. 

Her belly had not receded and still looked five or six months pregnant. It wasn’t fat (she’s quite active and eats well), but a hard pregnancy bulge. I am skeptical but support her assertion. 

We go to five more specialists between June and August, all of whom say they can’t account for the abdominal tissue but ultrasounds, low HCG, and urine tests all disconfirm the possibility of a pregnancy. My fiancé is not dissuaded and continues to tell friends and family she is with child. I am now genuinely worried. 

By September, she writes off any further clinical testing and the medical community at large. She begins speaking exclusively with doulas and midwives on Internet groups; looking into cryptic pregnancies, twisted uteri, delayed implantation. Our relationship is strained. 

Her physical symptoms do not recede and she continues to tell anyone who’ll listen that she is due any day now. She stops going to our joint activities and lines our furniture with plastics in preparation of childbirth. She researches home birthing and begrudges me for not doing the same. 

We fight. I tell her that I believe her symptoms are psychogenic. I believe that her desire for maternity has produced a phantom pregnancy. These mostly occur in women who’ve lost a pregnancy between 33 and 35 years of age. My fiancé is 34. She accuses me of calling her crazy, and I tell her the subconscious mind longing for a child is very sane, but she considers my disbelief an insult. 

She begins to justify her extended pregnancy in odd ways, saying that she herself was a 52 week pregnancy (she wasn’t), that some pregnancies can carry to well over a year (they can’t), and that we’ll be millionaires once we sue the hospitals who’ve misdiagnosed the pregnancy (we won’t). I refute these claims, as the longest pregnancy ever was three months beyond nine, and try to use her logic (potential harm to herself and the fetus beyond nine months) as a way to reintroduce my fiancé to proper medical care. She refuses it. 

The first week of December we have a midwife in our home who brings a sonogram and fetoscope, hears nothing, and again disconfirms a pregnancy. I tell the midwife my theory and the midwife finds it plausible. My fiancé consents that she is not pregnant. 

Until the holidays, when she tells both me and our entire extended family that she still feels kicks, has bloody mucilage, and has been talking with a midwife 150 miles from our home who has seen this kind of thing all the time. It goes over as well as it sounds. I am both horrified and exasperated. I tell her this is verging on 52 weeks and she tells me some pregnancies can reach 1.7 years. 

She schedules an appointment with this new midwife and announces that I cannot come with her as I am too rife with negativity. I drive my fiancé to the midwife’s home - an apartment in a questionable area of a questionable city - and fill the hour by trying to find a whisky I’ve been looking for. 

I am hoping this woman will see the desperation and as gently as possible tell my fiancé she’s not with child, but I pick her up and she’s beaming. I should’ve realized that you don’t scour the Internet to find someone to validate your delusions if you aren’t confident they’ll be affirmed. 

“The midwife felt the baby and taught me how to feel it, too. She poked it and it moved from one side of my uterus to the other. She used a Doppler to hear it. She said I know my body and to believe in myself.” 

Am I the asshole for not indulging this fantasy? 

Update: 

I’ve asked her go to a therapist with me. She laughed and made my disbelief an issue of me not trusting her body and intuition. 

I told her to be wary of the cryptic pregnancy support groups that allege low HCG pregnancies that don’t show up on ultrasound and can last 3-5 years are real and common. They’re taking advantage of vulnerable people. She said there are hundreds of women who’ve had successful births in those groups. It’s cultic. 

She reiterated that she heard movement and a heartbeat on the Doppler. I proposed that by now it would show up on an ultrasound and asked her to get another one for me. She refused and suggested that ultrasounds are linked to autism. 

At this point she said that she would deal with the pregnancy herself since I didn’t trust her and I assured her I was only concerned because I cared. She clammed up. 

I’ve notified her family of my concerns. 

Update 2: 

After increasingly reckless behavior that led to not one, but two extremely preventable house fires (and with that behavior showing no signs of slacking), I have exited the relationship. 

Among few blessings I’ve had this past year were that my dog was with me on both occasions  and she and I were not harmed by smoke or flame. 