getting pregnant

I used to believe that women could only get pregnant once they were married and it just sort of happened

Anon

My cousin told me that men get women pregnant by peeing in their belly button. Then and there, I vowed to remain childless if that is what I had to put up with!

Lisa

being from a conservative country India, I was thinking if a boy kisses a girl's breasts she will get pregnant! and that was how people had babies

anon

When my cousin was really little up until she was about 13 believed that if a woman sat on a toilet seat, she would get pregnant. So she always used to squat when she'd pee, or so she said. lol

My father also used to tell us girls when we were little and in our teens, that if we slept with the curtains open and moonbeams shone on us while we were sleeping, that we would get pregant. Later I found out that he only told us that to prevent us from leaving the curtains open at night and catching a cold from a wayward draft. I still have trouble sleeping with the curtains open though! lol

Anon

I always knew that babies came from pregnant women, but whenever I asked my parents where they came from before that, they just told me "from heaven". So I tended to believe that once a woman reached a certain age, she just fell pregnant and it had nothing to do with men.

tb

I used to believe that having sex meant kissing each others privates, and that is how a girl became pregnant. I still remember being scared to death when I was about 6, thinking I had gotten the neighbor girl pregnant by kissing her "down there" behind the bushes at her house.

still too young for fatherhood

When I was about 10 years old, I knew that a penis had to go in a vagina to make a baby, but all I could imagine a man could do when his penis was inside was to urinate. I was so sure that the words "God shed his grace on me" meant that he peed inside of a woman. Doesn't seem very logical now, but it made sense to me at the time.

Nancy

I used to belive that a man could get pregnant.

Ima Homo

When I asked where babies came from (age 5) I was initially given a silly explanation (the cabbage patch one I think), but demanded a proper answer, so I was given a detailed and truthful scientific description and also shown a documentary on the whole process that my parents taped specially for me. I knew there had to be a Mummy and a Daddy who were married and that they had to love each other. I knew they had to cuddle and kiss and the man had to put his 'dinky' inside her 'muff' - this whole process seemed very boring to me. Then I thought the man peed in her and his pee had special tadpoles in that were much smaller than the tadpoles we had at school and were specially to make babies.

Luckily I knew when, where and how they came out, and that it was very painful and messy.

But when I questioned why there were stories in newspapers about teenage girls being pregnant (this is in the 1980's when the British teen-pregnancy problem began) I was told it was because 'there was something wrong with them' and I thought it must be a terrible disease!

However, after my sister was born when I was 7 I became very knowledgable on the whole matter and educated all my classmates. I'll never forget the day a friend looked really pleased with herself and said 'Think of what Mary and Joseph had to do to get Jesus!' and I pointed out to her that Mary was a virgin and Jesus was put there by God. She was laughed at a lot for that.

Shelley, London, UK

My mom told me that when a man and woman want a baby they pray really hard and if God thinks they would be a good mom and dad, the woman gets pregnant. I always loved babies and thought, even at the ripe old age of 9, that I would be a great mom, so I prayed and prayed and prayed. Who knew it would take 15 more years?!

kp

I thought when I was younger that you could get pregnant, especially as an unmarried teenager, if you did something "bad". The term "bad" meant not obeying your parents, or lying or anything. I was afraid of becoming a teenager. What if I slipped up one day, such as lying to my parents, the end result was me being punished by becoming pregnant?
When I figured out you actually had to physically do something to get pregnant, when I was about 12, I was so relieved!
I think this belief has lead to a deep fear of ever having kids.

Christina

From the ages of 12 to 14, I believed that if I were bad, God could make me pregnant as punishment. I was terrified I'd become pregnant for just thinking bad thoughts, and my family would think I had sex. I always wondered how I would explain to them that I didn't have sex, I was just impregnated by God like the Virgin Mary. I don't know why I believed this, I knew how babies were made, and I wasn't religious, but the idea just popped into my head one day and stayed there. I had some crazy ideas back then...

Brandy

Masturbation would make me pregnant.

Tamara