With regards to the "smelling pregnancy pheromones" thing, I've never noticed it in pregnant women. However, this might explain something else I've found unusual.
A few years ago, I dated a transgender girl for about seven months. She always seemed to smell really nice, even when it wouldn't have made sense for her to be wearing perfume, and I'd never encountered anything like that particular smell before. I believe that pregnancy-related hormones and the compounds used in female HRT are effectively the same, and possibly the latter are more potent?