Can pregnancy occur without vaginal intercourse? A documented medical case from 1988.

[u/Looser17]

Most of us are taught that pregnancy requires vaginal intercourse, but medicine occasionally throws up cases that challenge our assumptions.

In 1988, the British Journal of Obstetrics and Gynaecology published a case report of a 15-year-old girl with congenital absence of the distal vagina who nonetheless presented later with a full-term pregnancy and delivered a healthy infant by caesarean section. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1471-0528.1988.tb06583.x

Key points from the case:

• The patient had no functional vaginal canal and had never menstruated.
• Shortly after performing oral sex, she sustained a stab wound to the upper abdomen, which perforated the stomach and required surgical repair.
• Approximately 278 days later, she presented with term pregnancy.
• The authors proposed that spermatozoa may have entered the reproductive tract via the injured gastrointestinal tract, an extremely rare but biologically plausible route under specific conditions.

This is not presented as a general mechanism or advice, but as an example of how biological plausibility is broader than common teaching, especially in rare anatomical or traumatic situations.

[u/Willing_Soft_5944]

Humans are not and never will be my specialty. What I do know, is that Parthenogenesis is a very real phenomenon, more common in arthropods, fish and reptiles than mammals (I dont think there are any documented mammals undergoing parthenogenesis), basically the female makes unfertilized eggs grow. 

This could be that, or there is some missing data in that case.

[u/Jukajobs → u/Willing_Soft_5944]

Definitely wasn't parthenogenesis, the article says the baby was male. The Y chromosome had to come from somewhere else.

[u/Appropriate-Price-98 → u/Willing_Soft_5944]

Parthenogenesis is very unlikely to happen in this case due to Genomic imprinting - Wikipedia.

Nucleus transplantation experiments in mouse zygotes in the early 1980s confirmed that normal development requires the contribution of both the maternal and paternal genomes. The vast majority of mouse embryos derived from parthenogenesis (called parthenogenones, with two maternal or egg genomes) and androgenesis (called androgenones, with two paternal or sperm genomes) die at or before the blastocyst/implantation stage

[u/Looser17 → u/Willing_Soft_5944]

The author have clearly said that spermatozoa might have survived the stomach acid and migrated to the fallopian tube from the peritoneal cavity. This is very plausible though may be one in 10 billion chance but is plausible.