Grant writing makes you crazy and also forces bloggers to stoop to ever lower levels. Hence this from the Discover Magazine blog via Boingboing.
While trawling for gold in the medical case literature they struck it rich with the story of the 15 year old girl with no vagina who got pregnant by giving her boyfriend a blow job (British Journal of Obstetrics and Gynaecology: 1988 Sep;95(9):933-4). Not possible? You be the judge:
Case report:
The patient was a 15-year-old girl employed in a local bar. She was admitted to hospital after a knife fight involving her, a former lover and a new boyfriend. Who stabbed whom was not quite clear but all three participants in the small war were admitted with knife injuries.The girl had some minor lacerations of the left hand and a single stab-wound in the upper abdomen. Under general anaesthesia, laparotomy was performed through an upper midline abdominal incision to reveal two holes in the stomach. These two wounds had resulted from the single stab-wound through the abdominal wall. The two defects were repaired in two layers. The stomach was noted empty at the time of surgery and no gastric contents were seen in the abdomen. Nevertheless, the abdominal cavity was lavaged with normal saline before closure. The condition of the patient improved rapidly following routine postoperative care and she was discharged home after 10 days
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Precisely 278 days later the patient was admitted again to hospital with acute, intermittent abdominal pain. Abdominal examination revealed a term pregnancy with a cephalic fetal presentation. The uterus was contracting regularly and the fetal heart was heard. Inspection of the vulva showed no vagina, only a shallow skin dimple was present below the external urethral meatus and between the labia minora. An emergency lower segment caesarean section was performed under spinal anaesthesia and a live male infant weighing 2800 g was born. (full text of case report on Discover blog)
The story, elicited by puzzled and highly curious medical attendants at the baby’s birth, was that the knife fight was occasioned when her old boy friend caught her giving her new boy friend oral gratification and that in the ensuing surgery sperm in her stomach (which was empty and conjectured to have higher than usual pH because she was in a fasting state) gained access to her reproductive organs through the lacerated and then lavaged gastrointestinal tract.
What’s next? You can get pregnant from toilet seats?
