When Melanie Smith was 18, a doctor told her she would not be able to carry a child. She accepted the diagnosis and stopped imagining motherhood as part of her future.
“He said I had a hostile uterus,” Smith tells TODAY.com, using an outdated term, once applied to uterine scarring or other conditions believed to affect fertility. She also had a history of irregular periods, including once going an entire year without menstruating.
Years later, those assumptions shaped how she interpreted the subtle changes in her body. So when the 28-year-old author began experiencing pain late on Christmas Eve, she believed she was dealing with severe abdominal cramping or constipation, not labor.
As the discomfort intensified in the early hours of Dec. 25, she and her husband, Donovan O’Dell, went to the nearest hospital, Vista Medical Center East in Waukegan, Illinois.
"I did think it was a little weird that the pain was intermittent and not constant," she says. Those sensations were, in fact, contractions.
Hospital staff quickly determined that Smith was in active labor. The discovery stunned her. She had received no prenatal care and had not known she was pregnant, experiencing none of the symptoms she associated with pregnancy — no morning sickness, no significant weight gain. She did have occasional back pain that she chalked up to a 2020 surgery.
Smith is part of a small and often misunderstood group of women who experience what experts call cryptic pregnancies, cases in which a person does not realize they are pregnant until late in gestation, or sometimes not until delivery. Research suggests such pregnancies occur in roughly one in 475 cases after 20 weeks. About one in 2,500 cases are not discovered until birth.
“I didn’t have a car seat, clothes, diapers, a pediatrician, nothing,” Smith says. “We weren’t set up for this at all.”
Because the hospital’s maternity ward had recently closed and the delivery was imminent, there was no time to transfer her. Less than three hours after she arrived, Smith gave birth to a healthy baby boy, weighing 8 pounds, 1 ounce.
In the moments that followed, Smith said fear quickly overtook the initial shock. Faced with decisions she had never anticipated making, Smith briefly considered placing the newborn for adoption.
“We weren’t ready,” she says. “This wasn’t something we had planned for.” But that thinking shifted after she watched O’Dell, 35, hold his son for the first time.
“He fell in love with him immediately,” Smith recalls. “And once I held him, I knew he wasn’t going anywhere.”
The couple named their son Vincent. Smith said the name had long been a favorite of her husband’s.
News of Vincent’s arrival stunned Smith’s family, many of whom had spoken with her just a day earlier. When relatives received calls from the hospital, several initially assumed it was a joke.
“They thought I was pranking them!” she says, with a laugh. “I just had talked to my sister the day before about Christmas plans, and then suddenly I was calling from the hospital with a baby!”
Smith and O’Dell, who works as a cook, recently relocated to Arizona to be closer to his family. A GoFundMe organized by a relative has been set up to help the couple cover the unexpected costs associated with the birth.
“I love being an aunt and I have such a good bond with my niece and nephew. I thought I didn’t need kids of my own,” Smith tells TODAY. “I’ve been so wrong about anything in my life.”
The timing, she says, felt fitting. “I couldn’t have asked for a more perfect Christmas gift.”
