A girl became pregnant after being stabbed in the stomach after oral sex?

The story of a kind of immaculate conception – that of a 15-year-old girl who became pregnant despite lacking a fully developed vagina – has permeated the internet for many years.

After performing oral sex on her new boyfriend, the story goes, the teenager was “caught in the act” and “stabbed in the stomach” by her former lover. She then became pregnant.

Although the story dates back to 1988, it resurfaced in a job shared on Reddit in 2023:

In 1988, a 15-year-old girl without a vagina living in the small southern African country of Lesotho became pregnant after her boyfriend’s sperm gained access to her reproductive organs via a stab wound.
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Thanks to a Google Keyword Search (archive)Snopes determined that iterations of the incident had circulated in online circles since at least 2010 and to have recirculated frequently in the years that follow.

Snopes searched the National Institutes of Health PubMed database, which includes more than 37 million citations to literature and research in the biomedical sciences. We discovered that the story came from an actual case report in the British Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecologyof which a PDF can be consulted here (archive).

The 1988 case report described a girl without a fully developed vagina who apparently became pregnant after being stabbed in the stomach following oral sex.

“A plausible explanation for this pregnancy is that sperm accessed the reproductive organs via the injured gastrointestinal tract,” the authors write. But how exactly the sperm was able to gain this “access” – for example, through the drool on her stomach that entered her body through the puncture wound – is not entirely clear. Snopes has contacted the author of the report via email for further clarification and will update this article if we receive a response.

It should be noted that a case report differs from peer-reviewed research studies in that it is a retrospective clinical case analysis.. Case reports describe a clinical event but do not meet the research criteria set out by the Ministry of Health and Social Services, which are “a systematic investigation, including research development, testing, and evaluation, designed to develop or contribute to generalizable knowledge.” In short, this report provides anecdotal evidence, but not established, peer-reviewed research.

According to the report, a 15-year-old girl was admitted to hospital after a knife fight involving her, her former lover and the new boyfriend.

“Just before being stabbed in the stomach, she had performed oral sex on her new boyfriend and was caught in the act by her former lover,” the report’s author wrote. “Who exactly stabbed who was not entirely clear, but all three participants in the small war were admitted with knife wounds.”

Doctors determined through a small exploratory incision known as a laparotomy that the young girl had two holes in her stomach resulting from a single stab wound. Her stomach was empty of “gastric contents” at the time of surgery, so doctors rinsed the area before stitching it up. She was released after 10 days.

According to experts, the median length of a human pregnancy is 280 days. The patient in question was readmitted to the hospital 278 days after the stabbing with what appeared to be labor pains.

Upon further examination, doctors reportedly heard the heartbeat of a fetus.

Although she was in active labor, the girl had no vagina, only a “shallow skin dimple,” according to the case report. This is a condition known as “aplastic distal vagina“, in which the vagina is closed or absent. Also known as vaginal aplasia, 1 in 5,000 live births of women suffer from this disease, caused by a defect in the canalization of the vagina. THE vaginal canal is a muscular canal that extends from the vulva, the external genitalia, to the cervix or cervix.

The patient’s uterus ended in a 2-centimeter-deep vagina, according to the report.

“The patient was fully aware of the fact that she did not have a vagina and she had begun oral experiments after disappointing attempts at conventional sexual intercourse,” reads the report, which adds that her ovaries and genitals external appearance otherwise normal.

Doctors performed an emergency C-section and delivered a healthy boy weighing just over 6 pounds.

According to the report, the girl told doctors that she had never had her period and that although “she had been worried about the increase in size of her abdomen,” she could not believe that she could be pregnant.

Immaculate conception aside, the report’s author hypothesized that sperm gained access to the reproductive system through the perforated gastrointestinal tract. Sperm do not survive very long outside of the pH of the vaginal canal, but the author argued that the high pH of saliva could have helped preserve the sperm. And since his stomach was empty, the sperm would have avoided potentially harmful stomach acid.

“The young mother, her family and the father-to-be quickly adapted to the new situation and some cattle changed hands to prove that there were no hard feelings,” the report reads. At the age of 2.5, the child “looked very much like his legal father”, which, according to the author, “rules out an even more miraculous conception.”

After several attempts at vaginal reconstruction, the young girl finally underwent a hysterectomy to relieve “debilitating pain.”

The author of the case report, Douwe Verkuylformer practicing gynecologist, was published in several renowned scientific publications, including The Lancet And PLOS Medicine. These publications listed Verkuyl’s affiliations as both with the Bulawayo United Hospitals in Zimbabwe and at Bethesda Hospital in the Netherlands.

Some publications reported that the event occurred in South Africa, but Verkuyl’s report cited hospitals in that country and Zimbabwe.

Sources