The science news site Live Science occasionally shares bizarre, often astonishing medical cases that were previously lost to time. The one they’ve dug up this week is nothing short of horrifying. Content warning: it deals with underage sex and violence against women.
The case is set in 1988 South Africa. A 15-year-old girl went to the hospital to find out what was up with her abdominal pain. The doctors told her that the pain was being caused by the baby inside of her because she was nine months pregnant. That pain was contractions; she was in labor, and the baby’s head was facing downward in her birth canal. She was going to give birth at any second.
This was especially weird considering that there was no way this teenage girl could have had penetrative sex. Not only had she not had sex, but she physically could not due to a rare condition where her vaginal opening was closed. Instead, there was a small indentation of skin where a hole should be. It’s a condition called Distal Vaginal Atresia and it is quite rare. Only an estimated 1 in 4,000 to 10,000 newborn females are born with it.
The doctors injected anesthesia into her spine and performed a cesarean section to remove the healthy baby boy. With the pregnancy part solved, now it was time to figure out the mystery of how she got pregnant to begin with when it seemed like that should’ve been a physical impossibility.
How A Teenage Girl Became Pregnant After Oral Sex
I will warn you now that this is where things take a disturbing and violent turn. After the emergency C-section, the girl told a nurse that one day, nine months before this sudden, unexpected birth, she was giving oral sex to her boyfriend when her ex-boyfriend showed up. In a rage, he stabbed her in the upper abdomen, causing two wounds in her stomach. The doctors at the time patched her up and released her from the hospital.
Her doctors surmised that the wounds the stabbing created allowed some of the semen she swallowed to pass into her reproductive organs. Sperm can be killed by the acidity of stomach acid. But the doctors theorize that the girl was “underfed” at the time of the stabbing, which might have lowered her stomach’s pH, thus allowing the sperm to remain viable when it was violently passed into her reproductive system.
If you think you may be in an abusive relationship, you can call the National Domestic Violence Hotline at 1-800-799-7233 or visit their website, thehotline.org.