Is this for real?
http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/discoblog/2010/02/01/ncbi-rofl-thats-one-miraculous-conception/
Not a doctor, but if true, it’s a pretty wild thing. It almost sounds as crazy as the story often attibuted to the term “son of a gun”. That is, a woman gets pregnant during the Civil War when a bullet passes through a man’s testicles, picking up sperm, and goes into a woman’s abdomen, impregnating her.
IANAD, but pretty sure it’s hokum.
For one thing, the stomach is full of potent acid and ravenous bacteria, I doubt a sperm could survive in it for any length of time.
For another, it’d be a pretty weird stab angle, to punch a hole from stomach to uterus. Not to mention a magical stab, since there happens to be quite a mess of guts between those two organs.
For a third, had the knife wound really pierced her stomach, and the contents thereof had somehow completely drained into her uterus, AND the surgical team somehow missed that, she’d have become septic something fierce as the bacterias living in the stomach colonized their swanky new digs. And that’s on top of the acid.
ETA : oh, and statsman1982, that story is bunk too (AND its etymological attribution to the idiom as well) - check ye olde Snopes 
Well the bit that made me do a double take was “some cattle changed hands to prove that there were no hard feelings.” :eek:
Apparently it was in Lesotho, in 1988.
Kobal2, I certainly understand your skepticism, but the paper does appear to be from the British Journal of Obstetrics and Gynaecology, which appears to be a reasonably respectable journal. That ought to mean it passed a fairly rigorous peer review. (The journal claims to have an impact factor of 3.101. I don’t really know how impact factors run in the medical field, but I guess that is decent for this sort of journal or they wouldn’t be boasting about it. They are on volume 117 now, so they must have been around a while, which, in academic journals, is usually evidence of non-suckiness.)
It has also been cited, but only once, and in a journal that (to this non-medic, but experienced academic) does show suspicious signs of likely suckiness.
Once, for ten minutes… 
Or it was a jolly bit of cheeky fun, what ?
FWIW, the “pregancy by Minnie ball through a soldier’s scrotum” story also first appeared in a serious medical journal without much in the way of wink-wink-nudge-nudges. Presumably because doctors would have known *someone *was taking the piss ;).
I can’t help noticing that the woman here supposedly came back “precisely 278 days later” which happens to coincide with the number of days in that seminal yarn, which I would assume OB/GYNs around the world have heard or read about by now.
I consider it highly unlikely, although that’s how case reports get into the literature in the first place.
One correction to a comment above: sperm do not have to get into her uterus via a stab wound; they only have to get to the general vicinity of the fallopian tube fimbriae where they can join up with the ovum. In effect they’ve taken a shortcut.
The story, although reported in a reputable journal, is still a little too cute with the cattle and the “precisely 278 days.” And the Lesotho medical system 20 years ago can reasonably be considered a suspect source for top-notch medical evaluation.
Also, I find this comment suspicious: “A plausible explanation for this pregnancy…” If the findings were otherwise absolutely accurate it’s the ONLY explanation. I can see some fudging behind the scenes about just how maldeveloped her vagina was. Normal external genitalia, a completely absent vagina, and a uterus normal enough to carry a pregnancy to term would be an extremely rare combination of congenital abnormalities. On the other hand, maldevelopment of some part of the vagina–or even a relatively tight hymen preventing penetration–would be pretty common; in those circumstances sperm can find their way north even if Mr Happy won’t fit. (This is why the absence of lochia was presented as a way of arguing against any vaginal channel at all.)
So now you have an extremely rare anatomic condition that combines with an almost-impossible mechanism of pregnancy in a woman who just happens to have a relatively achlorhydric (also highly unusual even in the presence of a short-term fast) stomach at the time she performs fellatio.
It’s much, much more likely that her vagina was a little less aplastic than reported and her efforts at intercourse were what produced the route for impregnation even if full penetration was not accomplished.
Well, it wasn’t the April issue.
My only addition to** Chief Pedant**s excellent post is to point out that there are many, many cultures where there are extremely strong incentives for young unmarried women to deny having had intercourse.
Given that, statements of nearly anyone involved in a miraculous pregnancy should, IMO, be viewed with extreme suspicion.
I teach at a university and have access to journals online. I looked up and viewed the article and it seems to have been legitimately published. I searched around and found no scholarly discredit.
I did find an article that references the original. It concerns another 3rd world miracle - an Indian drunk has living sperm in his blood! If sperm can live in the blood, perhaps it can get to and fertilize an egg.
Also, a family might sew up the vaginal opening to prevent further sexual adventures after the girl first had sex and got caught - fight and stabbing ensues.