Exploring UP journeys among women with psychiatric vulnerability using interpretative phenomenological analysis 163 "[…] The only thing is that I'm not sleeping anymore. I'm having troubles, sleeping. But I don't have anything [pregnancy symptoms] right. I just feel, I still didn't digest the idea that I'm pregnant. I think when I talk, I'm like, okay, if you see in the introduction, I even forgot about it, right? It's kind of for me, it's. Yeah. It's, ehh, it has been hard to admit that I'm pregnant. That's the truth." (Participant 5) Participants used various words to verbalize the shock they were in after discovering the UP, which marked their experience. "And the line was like as thick as it could be, it was like ‘you are pregnant’. I was just like ‘God dammit’." (Participant 4) Her expression gave a negative tone to the discovery. Participant 6 started speaking quickly and repeating her words when sharing the discovery of the pregnancy. Her words mark astonishment but also acceptance. "So ehm, so with my boyfriend, we actually met only like six weeks before we learned that we are pregnant. So that was like, we were like, oh my God. That's, that's way, that's way too soon, right? And it's like, and we, we didn't plan for it. We didn't expect it. It happened. It's, it happens." (Participant 6) My decision to make The decision to continue or terminate the pregnancy was dependent on intrinsic and extrinsic factors. The most important intrinsic factor was the presence or absence of a (latent) desire for children and of a future family. The following participants responded that they would want to have children in the future: "We knew we wanted to have children" (participant 4) and "We always wanted to, we knew we wanted children." (participant 2), "And I was also very clear since the very beginning that I, I do want to have kids." (participant 6). Aside from a desire for a family, women’s age and fear of not conceiving in the future played a part in accepting UP. "I turned 39 this year, I was 38, of course. I also thought; yeah, whatever comes now is wanted." (Participant 3) Second, participants valued bringing a child into the world after having met certain conditions, such as having a paid job, housing and adult age. "Just getting everything a bit sorted indeed, and basically, you know, we both have good jobs, and we can financially raise a child just fine, we have the space for it, so
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy MTk4NDMw