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

time to catch her with her boyfriend’s penis in her mouth: to the ex’s eye, in flagrante delicto. The details of the fight that ensued are unclear, but it seems the girl tried to protect her boyfriend (and herself) from attack, because she ended up with lacerations on her hand; she also sustained two stab wounds to her stomach.

Just over nine months after the doctors at Mafeteng District Hospital stitched up her wounds, the girl returned. This time she was much larger in girth and complained of acute, but unexplained, pains in her lower abdomen. The possibility that she was pregnant had never occurred to her – not because she was naïve, but because she was well aware, as her doctors were soon to discover, that she did not have a vagina.

In one sense, having sex and getting pregnant is as straightforward an event as any. You need a male and a female, they have sexual intercourse, sperm meets egg, and, some time later, a baby is produced. All of this we take for granted, though not in a glib sense; as we have seen, much can go wrong along the way, and sometimes babies are born with debilitating diseases and sometimes they are miscarried or emerge stillborn. Yet, in all these cases, we assume that at one point a sperm met an egg, thereby beginning a pregnancy. But step back from that assumption and consider the circumstance within which sperm meets egg, and even whether or not sperm meets egg at all.

The Lesotho teenager was treated by Douwe Verkuyl, who reported on her predicament in the British Journal of Obstetric Gynaecology. Dr Verkuyl suggested that the pregnancy may have been the first recorded case of ‘oral conception’: the knife wound to the stomach may have allowed the sperm the girl had swallowed to find its way from her gut to her womb. As unlikely as it may seem, this is a strategy that has seen precedents in nature. There are animals in which fertilization can be achieved artificially by injecting sperm into the abdominal cavity, from where they swim down a Fallopian tube to the egg. In fact, for some, like the blood-sucking African bat bug, impregnation via the abdomen is the standard mode of operation. Even though the females of the species have not one but two vaginas – one real, one fake – the males use neither. Instead, a male will stab a female’s abdomen and inseminate the female’s blood. Of course, just because a relative of the bed bug can do it doesn’t imply it can happen in humans too. But Verkuyl noted two conditions that she thought made the scenario more likely: when her young patient arrived at hospital after the fracas, her stomach was devoid of food (and the gastrointestinal juices that are produced to digest it) and saliva itself tends to be alkaline (it has a high pH). These things, she thought, helped the sperm survive what would have otherwise been the hostile, acidic environment in the stomach.

Shortly after the child’s birth by Caesarean section, the families of the girl and her boyfriend exchanged cattle to seal their union. But the girl’s son, conceived from that gruesome and bizarre violent encounter was to be her only child. Around the time her son reached the age of two and a half, the girl began to suffer crippling pains, because her menstrual blood, which had no outlet, was collecting in the cavity of her uterus. Unable to stop her periods through drug treatments, doctors ordered a hysterectomy, the removal of the uterus. ‘By that time,’ Verkuyl wrote, ‘the son looked very much like the legal father,’ a fact that ‘excludes an even more miraculous conception’. By which, one assumes, the doctor was alluding to the conception of a child without the involvement of sperm at all.

Mission impossible? It should be. Yet, some animal eggs regularly manage to achieve virgin births – not just tiny insects, but large vertebrates, including fish, birds, and reptiles. And, in fact, human eggs can work on their own too.

Most animals have eggs with a lot in common. Of the billion or so cells in our bodies, the egg is the largest cell that animals have. Among most amphibians and fish, an egg is about as big as the full stop at the end of this sentence. If you divided that full stop into one hundred pieces, most other cells in their bodies would be about the size of just one of those bits. Human eggs, by comparison, are the size of ten pieces. Reptiles and birds, of course, have immense eggs – each egg in the cardboard carton you bring home from the supermarket to scramble up for your breakfast is essentially a single egg cell.

The mammalian egg is the site of a number of quite extraordinary biological processes, not least of which is the way the egg itself is produced. The first person to figure out that there was something unusual about eggs was Edouard Van Beneden, in 1883. At the time, Van Beneden was studying how the cells in Ascaris megalocephala, a worm parasite of horses, were made. By throwing live female worms into containers filled with diluted alcohol and leaving them there to ‘stew’ for several months, he was able to dissolve the worms’ cells enough to reveal their components. (This method of damaging cells is still used in labs to isolate DNA and RNA; it’s also the reason why alcohol wipes are effective at killing bacteria.) Van Beneden observed that the worms had four chromosomes in almost all of their cells. In their eggs, however, there were just two chromosomes. To Van Beneden, this made no sense: the eggs were made from cells with four chromosomes, so two chromosomes had seemingly disappeared. He then noticed that