Stranger than fiction!!

Published in the very reputable British Journal of Obstetrics and Gynaecology, in 1988, titled:Oral conception. Impregnation via the proximal gastrointestinal tract in a patient with an aplastic distal vagina. Case report.

So when you were taught that a woman can’t get pregnant from engaging in oral sex… well, apparently it’s theoretically possible given the right set of circumstances. That is why a 15-year-old girl in the small African country of Lesotho who was born without a vagina and who had engaged only in fellatio with her boyfriend had doctors puzzled when she gave birth to a healthy son.

The young girl, whose name is not given in the case report, arrived at a local hospital with all the signs of a woman in labor. Upon examination, doctors found no vagina, only a shallow skin dimple. Regardless of how the baby was conceived, it was ready to emerge from the womb. With no birth canal, the baby’s only option of escape was Caesarian section. Doctors delivered a baby boy via C-section (weighing in at 2.8 kg / 6.17 lbs), and then set out to solve the mystery of his conception.

As they say in the case study, after performing the emergency C-section:

While closing the abdominal wall, curiosity could not be contained any longer and the patient was interviewed with the help of a sympathetic nursing sister. The whole story did not become completely clear during that day but, with some subsequent inquiries, the whole saga emerged.

The girl’s hospital records showed that only 278 days earlier (about 9 months), she had arrived at the hospital with knife wounds to her stomach. How’d she get them? I’ll just quote the case study, as they describe it perfectly:

The patient was well aware of the fact that she had no vagina and she had started oral experiments after disappointing attempts at conventional intercourse. Just before she was stabbed in the abdomen she had practiced fellatio with her new boyfriend and was caught in the act by her former lover. The fight with knives ensued. She had never had a period and there was no trace of lochia after the caesarean section. She had been worried about the increase in her abdominal size but could not believe she was pregnant although it had crossed her mind more often as her girth increased and as people around her suggested that she was pregnant. She did recall several episodes of lower abdominal pain during the previous year.

While performing surgery to repair the stab wounds, doctor’s found two holes that opened the girl’s stomach to her abdominal cavity. They also noted that the girl arrived at the hospital with an empty stomach, resulting in the absence of large amounts of stomach acid or any other food matter.  Thus, it is thought, in the most unlikely of circumstances, that the sperm in the girl’s stomach gained access to the girl’s reproductive organs through her injured gastrointestinal tract.  Even given this access, it is still a long way for the sperm to travel; so how is it theorized that they survive the journey?

Well, in the first place, her stomach was mostly empty of stomach acid and sperm is protected from non-favorable environments by a nourishing medium called ejaculate. This ejaculate would have helped protect the girl’s new lover’s sperm from the remaining stomach acid, among other hazards. The stabbing also seems to have happened almost immediately after the girl ingested the sperm, so it needn’t have survived in the stomach long. And don’t forget about the strength of numbers. Sperm don’t travel alone. Even if ninety percent of them don’t survive the beginning of the journey, you are still left with millions of the tiny little swimmers and you only need one.

Dr. Peter Schlegel, chairman of urology at New York Presbyterian Hospital/Weill Cornell Medical Center in New York, weighed in on the issue and pointed out that sperm can normally swim up and out of the reproductive cavity and into the abdominal cavity. “The sperm are naturally there at times, and eggs are naturally there,” he says. “Eggs are released from the ovary, and they sort of dance around before they get taken up by the fallopian tube.”

In fact, getting pregnant as the result of sperm originating in your abdomen is possible enough that in the 1980s, during the early days of fertility treatments, doctors performed a procedure called DIPI (direct intraperitoneal insemination) during which they injected sperm into the lower abdomen hoping that it would find its way to an egg.

What makes this perfect storm of circumstances even more amazing is that the doctors involved thought it likely that this was the girl’s “first or nearly first ovulation otherwise one would expect that inspissated blood in the uterus and salpinges would have made fertilization difficult.”

So, in the end, did it really happen?  Well, we have a reputable journal where the case is well documented and published  in September of 1988!