You may have heard an unusual story that has just been known: that a Moroccan woman of 75 years, after becoming pregnant 46 years has given birth has given birth to a stone child. Sounds like science fiction, but it's a real fact. Is the strange case of stone babies.
They are extremely rare cases, occurs in 0.0045% of pregnant women and is known as lithopedia, derived from lithopedion, litho= stone; pedion= child
It is the product of an ectopic pregnancy, that is, when the egg fertilized by the sperm nests outside the uterus, usually in the abdomen. The pregnancy does not prosper and the fetus dies, but remains attached to some organ of the woman and begins to mummify.
The woman's immune system detects it as a threat and gradually covers it with light layers of calcium until calcifying it, causing it to acquire the appearance of a stone. Most cases are detected in elderly women, who have kept the fetus inside their bodies for decades.
In this case, almost five decades passed in which Zahra Aboitalib, the Moroccan woman, kept the fetus of the child already lifeless inside his body. She felt labor pains, but for fear of giving birth, they were interrupted and the child died. He considered him a 'sleeping child', which according to the popular Moroccan belief are babies who can live inside the womb of the woman to protect his honor.
Forty-six years later, feeling strong pains and performing an ultrasound, doctors discovered that his 'sleeping child' was actually an ectopic pregnancy, to which his body had assimilated as one more organ.
For a case of lithopedia there must be an extrauterine pregnancy, there must be fetal death after 3 and a half months of pregnancy and local conditions have to be given for calcium deposition, depending on the organ where You have deposited the fertilized egg.
Beyond the sensationalist of the news, we wanted to highlight the seemingly easy but how truly complex human reproduction can be. The lithopedia, this so strange phenomenon of stone babies Of which only 290 cases have been documented, it is a sample of this.
