Credit: Øyvind Holmstad, CC BY-SA 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons
In an astonishing medical case, a teenager has become pregnant after giving oral s*x to her boyfriend in Lesotho, Southern Africa.
The unnamed 15-year-old girl visited the hospital in Lesotho complaining of abdominal pain only to be found nine-month pregnant by doctors.
This became a puzzle for the doctors treating her as she was born with a rare birth defect called distal vaginal atresia that scientists estimate only affects between one in 4,000 to 10,000 newborn girls.
The condition in layman terms means the girl did not have a vaginal opening. Women with such a condition cannot conceive without the aid of technologies like in vitro fertilization (IVF).
Those with the condition can also not give birth through the vagina.
Doctors struggled to find an explanation for the girl’s conception and interrogated her about her relations with the opposite gender in the previous nine months.
They learnt that she had a boyfriend with whom she could only give oral pleasure because of lack of a normal female privates for a normal copulation.
Doctors also found out that she had a record of attending the same hospital about nine months earlier, when she presented with a stab wound to her stomach region.
The stab wound was inflicted by her ex-boyfriend who saw her giving oral s*x to her new boyfriend and he attacked her in a fit of jealous anger.
Writing in the British Journal of Obstetrics & Gynaecology, medics concluded that the sperm the girl had swallowed during her interaction with her boyfriend had travelled to her reproductive organs from her stomach via the stab wounds, resulting in conception.
Then, there was still a question of how the sperm survived the acid of the stomach before fertilising her egg in her uterus.
The acid in a human’s digestive system, which breaks down food into nutrients for the body, is normally potent enough to easily kill sperm on contact.
The doctors who attended to the teenager observed that she was malnourished and recognised that malnourishment could adversely affect the acidity of the stomach and concluded that the sperm might have survived because the girl was malnourished at the time of the stabbing.
They believe her malnourishment created the bizarre opportunity for the swallowed sperm to reach her uterus via the knife wound without getting killed along the way by the acid in her stomach.
The doctors recorded that the final piece of evidence that helped rule out what they termed a ‘more miraculous conception’ was that the boy, born weighing 6.2 pounds (2.8kg) via CS, grew up to resemble his father, the man she was intimate with before the attack.
In further interviews, the girl told medics she had been worried about her growing abdomen in months prior to giving birth.
She did not, however, for a moment thought she could be pregnant because of her lack of a vagina and absence of conventional s*x with her partner.
Her case has now been documented as a rare and extraordinary example of human reproductive anomalies facilitated by a series of events.
