28.02.2025 15:20
A 15-year-old girl from Lesotho in South Africa was admitted to the hospital with severe intermittent abdominal pain that strangely resembled labor pains. Routine tests revealed that the young girl was pregnant, and it was discovered that she had no vaginal opening, a rare condition affecting only 4,000 to 10,000 newborn girls.
As a medical anomaly, a young girl without a vaginal opening became pregnant as a result of a series of strange events following oral intercourse.
A 15-year-old girl from Lesotho in South Africa was hospitalized with severe intermittent abdominal pain, which strangely resembled labor pains.
To everyone's astonishment, routine tests revealed that these were indeed labor pains, as she was pregnant.
Doctors writing in the British Journal of Obstetrics & Gynaecology later discovered that the young girl had no vaginal opening, a rare defect affecting only 4,000 to 10,000 newborn girls.
Theoretically, this condition should have made it impossible for the young girl to become pregnant without technologies like in vitro fertilization (IVF).
This condition, known as vaginal atresia, also made it impossible for her to give birth through the vagina.
This meant that doctors had to perform a cesarean section to deliver a healthy baby boy weighing 6.2 pounds.
This case, dating back to 1988, has recently come back into the spotlight. The event that brought it to attention was a case report of a Scottish woman who thought her appendix had burst and learned 40 minutes later that she had given birth.
At the time it was written, the doctors treating the girl in Lesotho were baffled about how she had become pregnant.
The girl claimed she noticed changes in her body shape in the months leading up to the birth.
However, since she had no vaginal opening and had not engaged in penetrative vaginal intercourse, she "did not believe she was pregnant."
Doctors learned that the girl had presented to the hospital nine months earlier due to a knife wound to her abdomen shortly after performing oral sex.
At that time, the girl confessed to a nurse that her ex-boyfriend, who had caught her with her current partner, had attacked her in a violent assault they described as a "mini war."
Experts concluded that the sperm she swallowed somehow reached her reproductive organs through the knife wounds, leading to the unexpected pregnancy.
"The fact that her son resembled his father eliminated the possibility of an even more miraculous pregnancy," they added.
What makes this pregnancy even more astonishing is that stomach acid is usually strong enough to kill sperm quickly, thus preventing fertilization of an egg.
The medical team's most "reasonable" explanation is that the sperm survived due to the girl being malnourished during the assault.
They believe this reduced the acidity in her stomach, allowing the sperm to reach her uterus through the knife wounds and fertilize the egg.