14 DAY TRIAL // A Quebec woman led the entire town of Saint-Jean-sur-Richelieu to believe that she was expecting quintuplets, but in fact she wasn't even pregnant.
Barbara Bienvenue pretended to be with children and fooled her boyfriend for months. She broke the news of her pregnancy in September 2013, and told her boyfriend Paul Servat that she was pregnant with twins one month after they met on an online dating site.
The number of babies changed gradually, going to triplets, quadruplets, and eventually up to quintuplets. Bienvenue even let Paul choose names for the five babies she claimed to be carrying.
A friend of the woman even created a Facebook page to help the couple in getting assistance from the town.
However, her pregnancy was revealed as a fake when the delivery day arrived and nothing happened. She was supposedly due to give birth on Wednesday, but the day came and went and no baby was born.
The couple went to the hospital for the delivery at 34 weeks. After the medical staff examined the woman, a nurse took Paul aside and showed him the blood test results which revealed that his girlfriend was not pregnant.
“The doctors told me it was a phantom pregnancy,” the disappointed man said, according to Toronto Sun.
Paul was devastated to find out that his girlfriend had been lying to him all those months. The community also felt betrayed. The man said that his girlfriend's belly swelled, she suffered from morning sickness, and she even started lactating.
Relatives of the woman weren't surprised to hear that she faked her pregnancy. Apparently, the woman once pretended she had leukemia and has often claimed to suffer different afflictions.
“This isn't the first time she's done it. But honestly, we never would have thought she was sick enough to do it again,” a male relative said.
A previous boyfriend said that Bienvenue once told him she was expecting twins, and she allegedly raised money for the nonexistent babies.
Barbara Bienvenue is currently being kept under psychiatric observation.
The false belief that one is pregnant is called pseudocyesis, and it sometimes can be purely psychological. It is generally believed that false pregnancy is caused due to changes in the endocrine system of the body, leading to the secretion of hormones which translate into physical changes similar to those that take place during pregnancy.
There is no known treatment for women who suffer from phantom pregnancy, and mental-health experts usually recommend therapy.