Kelly Clarkson's 'Oops' Pregnancy Announcement Isn't Totally Crazy After All

Singer Kelly Clarkson may be “totally pregnant,” but she totally didn’t mean to tell the world on Wednesday. Doctors tell Yahoo Parenting this “pregnancy brain” behavior is more common than you’d think. (Photo: Getty Images).

Kelly Clarkson’s announcement that she’s pregnant, on stage, midsong at the Staples Center in L.A. Wednesday night, was a surprise to fans — and to herself.

“I wasn’t planning on announcing…[I’m] totally pregnant,” she blurted out in the middle of a song about her and her father, “Piece by Piece.” The singer, 33, later explained to the audience, “I didn’t want you to think I’m on pills or something,” and admitted that the declaration was actually an accident. “I would like to apologize to my husband,” the mother to daughter River Rose, 1, called out to her other half, Brandon Blackstock. “This was not planned. I’m just so hormonal. Everything is great, I haven’t vomited yet. That’s a win y'all.“

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While pregnancy news isn’t usually something a person spontaneously lets slip out, and so publicly at that, experts tell Yahoo Parenting that a blunder like this is something that can happen when women have so-called “pregnancy brain.”

“There are the emotional aspects of pregnancy and a well-known and scientifically-proven ‘hormonal storm’ that happens during pregnancy,” Dr. Jose Carugno, assistant professor of obstetrics and gynecology at the University of Miami Miller School of Medicine, tells Yahoo Parenting. “It’s due to an increased level of hormones such as progesterone and estrogen that can be up to 40 times higher than they are in nonpregnant women. Such high levels of hormones affect the brain, and that is the reason why pregnant patients behave a little different — which also makes pregnancy so fascinating.”

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And there are other factors that make an impact on pregnant women’s behavior causing them to seem a bit, well, erratic. “Pregnant women are often short on sleep,” Gil Weiss, MD, an assistant professor of clinical medicine at Northwestern University and an ob-gyn in Chicago, tells Yahoo Parenting. “When you don’t get enough sleep, you do have episodes of forgetting things, and short-term memory loss. Forgetting where your keys are is guaranteed.”

Then there’s the stress of the life changes associated with pregnancy that exacerbate the situation. “The whole ‘pregnancy brain’ tends to involve many factors,” says Weiss. And it’s actually not a bad thing, he adds.

Women’s odd behavior while expecting is the result of “reallocating resources,” he adds. “You have a limited number of physical and mental resources and ‘baby brain’ is the body’s way of saying, ‘I’m concentrating on the baby. Everything else is just not as important.’”

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