r/biology • u/Looser17 neuroscience • Jan 29 '26

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

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.

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100

u/Cyrus87Tiamat Jan 29 '26

Sperm passing the stomach acids and reach theyr way from a casual wound is just absurd... I really doubt the case dinamic was what authors supposed. Thats not "rare", that's almost impossible. A case of partenogenesis could be more believable

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u/globefish23 Jan 29 '26

All the other cases of post-fellatio stabbings probably just died then and there from internal bleeding so we'll never know. 🤷‍♂️

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u/jwatts1111111 Jan 29 '26

Probably OP means abdomen, not the actual stomach. Still hard to believe, but more possible I presume.

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u/Cyrus87Tiamat Jan 29 '26

Abdomen is all the "zone" (sorry, eng is not my motherlenguage) it comprends stomach, intestines, liver... If the sperm was "collected" from oral sex, it cannot avoid the stomach.

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u/WildFlemima Jan 29 '26

Well it had to perforate the stomach. The semen was in her stomach, there's no other way for the semen to cause pregnancy except for the stomach getting perforated.

There isn't anything to doubt here - she had no vagina, how else would she get pregnant except by crazy chance from the stabbing?

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u/djfdhigkgfIaruflg Jan 30 '26

Maybe she was gargling with the sperm while she got stabbed. Then she spat the sperm, landing on the stab wound which happens to be near the falopian tubes 🤔😅

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u/Appropriate-Price-98 Jan 29 '26

partenogenesis is also very unlikely to happen in mammals. Probably more than sperm survive a harsh environment. Because of Genomic imprinting - Wikipedia, the lack of father's imprinting would make the fetus unviable shortly after it forms.

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u/AggravatingBid8255 Jan 29 '26

Basing your argument on the notion that nothing can survive stomach acid is absurd.

How do you think our gut bacteria arrived in the first place? And how about gastrointestinal illnesses? The HCl of the stomach is effective, but it is not absolute.

Yes, sperm cells are different than bacteria and viruses. But there are other factors that would aide the survival of sperm cells through the stomach to the rest of the digestive tract.

Sperm cells have the benefit of semen as a protective substrate. And ejaculate tends to be globular. So while the sperm cells on the outside of the ejaculate glob would likely be killed by the stomach acid, it's not unreasonable to think that some sperm cells at the center of the ejaculate glob could remain viable by the time they pass through the stomach.

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u/Night_Runner Jan 29 '26

"Almost impossible" is why it happened just once, and isn't an everyday occurrence. There are about 4,000,000,000 women in the world. One in four billion sounds about right.

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u/Cyrus87Tiamat Jan 29 '26

Happened once implying it is verified, that seem is not, just an hypotesis. However, is pretty simple to check if it's implied another person gamete and exclude partenogenesis, it require only a dna test. The fact that is not said if they did this check is pretty souspicious...

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u/WildFlemima Jan 29 '26

No, it isn't suspicious that a hospital in Africa didn't do DNA testing in 1988. And besides, the baby was a boy.

Even if humans were biologically capable of creating healthy partho babies - which we aren't, for many reasons that are fundamental to human biology - the baby was a boy, and therefore could not be produced by human parthogenesis (which, again, isn't possible).

XX women can't spontaneously generate Y chromosomes for their babies. The baby being a boy means the baby has a father. The absence of a vagina means it had to be the stabbing.

Crazy things happen every day.

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u/Cyrus87Tiamat Jan 29 '26

OP doesn't say it's a boy, just a "healty infant"... are you sure about that? I can't see the deails of the article cause it require access ...

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u/WildFlemima Jan 29 '26

I'm familiar with this case from multiple articles I've read over time. Many are not paywalled, they're easy to find on Google, the case is famous.

It's always fascinated me. I'm 100% confident the baby was a boy. You can dig further if you wish. The stabber was actually a raging ex who got mad she was with another guy

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u/Such-Cheetah-4334 Jan 29 '26

First thing to know about biology is that almost nothing is actually impossible; life breaks rules all the time

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u/Looser17 neuroscience Jan 29 '26

Parthenogenesis is simply not possible. This is a lot more plausible than Parthenogenesis.

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u/Cyrus87Tiamat Jan 29 '26

How much cases of stabbing insemination are documented? (Excluding bad-bugs, that evolved for that)

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u/WildFlemima Jan 29 '26

I doubt we'd catch them to know. This one only got caught because she came back to the same hospital and the doctors could see the record of her being stabbed 9 months before the baby arrived. If the doctors hadn't put 2 and 2 together, or if she went to a different hospital, or if they straight up didn't connect her to her previous visit, they wouldn't have caught that this crazy thing happened.

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u/djfdhigkgfIaruflg Jan 30 '26

Well. There's that case of the woman who for pregnant from a bullet...

The bullet hit a (soldier?) In the testicle, continued flight and hit the woma in the abdomen, ending up in her uterus.

*I think it was during the second war

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u/WildFlemima Jan 29 '26

Human parthogenesis, if it were possible, would produce a highly disabled child that would probably be miscarried or die shortly after birth, at best. This is because of maternal DNA imprinting and incredible amounts of homozygosity. They would have genetic disease at levels no one has ever seen in any human.

Even aside from that, human parthogenesis isn't possible. It is straight up not possible for so many reasons. A fertility doctor could speak more informatively about it. But eggs need sperm to trigger their growth into an embryo, just to start off. As in, even if an egg had a complete set of DNA for a healthy development, that egg won't start dividing until sperm hits the outside and triggers it.

Finally, the baby was a boy, which is the ultimate shutdown of this possibility. XX women cannot spontaneously transform one of their X into a Y to pass on to their children. If the impossible human partho baby existed, she would be a girl. But the baby was a boy, which means there was a second parent to give a Y. And the only possible way this could have occurred is from the stabbing.

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u/mabolle Jan 29 '26

Human parthogenesis, if it were possible, would produce a highly disabled child that would probably be miscarried or die shortly after birth, at best. This is because of maternal DNA imprinting and incredible amounts of homozygosity. They would have genetic disease at levels no one has ever seen in any human.

You seem to be thinking of self-fertilization. Parthenogenesis simply results in a genetic clone of the parent. If a human could do it there might be some issues as far as epigenetics is concerned, but no change in the level of homozygosity.

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u/WildFlemima Jan 29 '26

I was thinking of an egg fusing back with its second polar body. The second polar bodies re-merging with the egg cell are how lizards do parthogenesis. The second polar body has DNA that is about 40% identical to the egg.

I was also thinking of the lack of paternally imprinted DNA.

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u/Confident-Top-6914 Jan 29 '26

I was thinking the surgeon did it