Like a Virgin by Prasad, Aarathi (recommended reading txt) 📕

Spurway knew that parthenogenesis was quite common in some insects, where the egg would start dividing inside the female without being fertilized, through some hormonal trigger. In the 1950s, scientists had even managed to force the eggs of cats and ferrets to develop into embryos all on their own, without sperm involved, so the process could conceivably occur in mammals. But these experiments had been highly artificial – the stuff of lab dishes, not of actual animals. Still, whether created inside a lab dish or an animal, a normal egg still only has one set of DNA. Whatever the species, this means that any offspring produced through parthenogenesis in a female could never have features that its mother did not. And that, Spurway thought, was the key to recognizing and proving a case of true virgin birth in a human.

Spurway decided to announce her guppy findings at a public talk entitled ‘Virgin Births’, presented at her university. At the end of her lecture, she mentioned her thoughts on using DNA to prove a virgin birth, said as something of a throwaway comment, a moment of speculation. But she did very openly suggest that there may actually be women out in the world who had given birth without having sex. It would be very rare, if it happened at all – otherwise, she noted, there should have been reports of fatherless pregnancies in women’s prisons or other places of complete segregation. Perhaps, she proposed, there were women who suspected that they had experienced a virgin birth, but didn’t mention it for fear of ridicule or social stigma. But if such women knew that their cases could be studied by scientists and doctors, even potentially verified, they might be more likely to come forward and speak about what had happened to them. Spurway added that odds were that a candidate child would be a girl and the spitting image of her mother. ‘No faking would be possible,’ she said. ‘Blood grouping and skin grafting would give the proof.’

Spurway’s words had been confined to the hallowed halls of University College and the ears of her fellow scientists, but her lecture had come to the attention of Audrey Whiting, an enterprising young journalist at the Sunday Pictorial, who had attended the event. After the talk, Whiting approached Spurway, asking for an interview, but the biologist waved her away, quipping that she did ‘not speak to the popular press’. The journalist pushed ahead anyway with a report on Spurway’s theory, and the editors put it on the front page.

The story, sporting the headline DOCTORS NOW SAY IT DOESN’T ALWAYS NEED A MAN TO MAKE A BABY, ran next to stiff-lipped assurances that the price of coal would not rise, advertisements for Brylcreem and Palmolive soap, and snapshots of demure starlets wrapped in demure bathing suits. Whiting informed her readers that there could be ten, maybe more, women in Britain who had given birth to a child without having sex with a man. But even for the tabloids, this was clearly outrageous, so Whiting had interviewed a number of doctors to offer opposing views. One issued a stern warning to the paper’s readers, lest they got too carried away. ‘Girls must not get silly ideas,’ he said. ‘The chance of a girl having a virgin birth would be twenty times less likely than her winning a football pool.’

Halfway down the page appeared the three words, in bold block capitals, that had stunned Emmimarie Jones – and doubled the newspaper’s distribution for the day. Under the ‘Find the Case’ subheading, the Pictorial invited women to come forward, in confidence, if they believed their daughters were the result of a virgin birth. It stipulated that these women must be prepared to submit to examination by a panel of leading doctors, who were excited by the chance to identify a virgin birth in real life. To design the tests and interpret their results, advice was sought from the Medical Research Council, Britain’s foremost authority in the area. If any woman’s case was proved correct, she and her daughter were set to make medical – indeed, human – history. The tabloid’s invitation ended with a quote from Helen Spurway lifted from the medical journal The Lancet: ‘Remember, some of the unmarried mothers cited as curiosities by their contemporaries may well have been telling the truth.’

Remarkably, nineteen candidates came forward in response to the appeal. Of course, they included some of the ‘innocent unmarried mothers cast out in disgrace by their families’ that the paper had made sure to mention. Eleven of these women were immediately eliminated: they had thought that an intact hymen must indicate they had had a virgin birth, as for many societies, an intact hymen is a mark of virginity. But in some women the hymen can rupture spontaneously or through physical activity – playing vigorously as a child. And remnants of the hymen can persist in some women after vaginal intercourse, sometimes even after childbirth. Plus, the hymen is semi-permeable, so penetration is not required for fertilization (though in these situations, pregnancy is much harder). In any case, the presence of a hymen (or its remains) didn’t mean that these candidates were truly virgins, and it certainly didn’t mean that no sperm could have reached their eggs.

So the Pictorial published a more transparent explanation under the banner, YOU ASK WHAT EXACTLY IS A VIRGIN BIRTH? The newspaper’s answer:

Normally a man provides the seed which makes a child grow inside the mother. But in parthenogenesis (virgin birth) no man – and nothing from a man – is involved in any way at all. A virgin birth child need not be a woman’s first child, and certainly need not be the child of a virgin.

After that, just eight candidates were left.