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

Human eggs are formed early in life, when a woman is but an embryo, between three and eight months into development. After that, all the eggs can do is wait.

The waiting usually lasts many years – just over a decade or so, until sex hormones begin to exert their powerful effects. Hormones are chemicals, circulating in the blood stream, that act on different target glands around the body. In women, the production of the sex hormones by the ovaries is stimulated by signals from the pituitary gland, a pea-sized structure at the base of our brains. Once puberty hits, the ovaries produce oestradiol, progesterone, and testosterone in a choreographed manner, with levels of the hormones in the blood shifting day by day in the dance from ovulation to menstruation or fertilization. Though it is a form of oestrogen, oestradiol is not a ‘female’ sex hormone as such; it is also produced in men as a by-product of testosterone, as is progesterone. Oestradiol does, however, play a very important role in female fertility, triggering, for instance, the growth of a variety of reproductive organs, including the vagina and the placenta. Progesterone, too, plays its part, including, it seems, in helping to keep the mother’s immune system from rejecting the embryo during pregnancy. With puberty, eggs begin maturing at the rate of approximately one every month.

By around age fifty, give or take ten years, the majority of the eggs that were present at a woman’s birth have been released – either discarded during her monthly menstruation or fertilized. Around this time, the ovaries stop acting on the signals from the pituitary, and oestradiol levels fall significantly – to around the same level as is present in men. Progesterone levels also take a dive. This rapid loss of sex hormones in a woman’s blood stream is what causes the hallmark symptoms of menopause: hot flushes and sweating attacks; a rise in the risk of heart disease and stroke; and osteoporosis, the ‘thinning’ of bones.

There are exceptions to the timing of the onset of menstruation and menopause, these critical moments at which the ovaries change their response to hormonal signals issuing from the brain. Just as ovarian teratomas have been reported to be found in octogenarians, post-menopausal mothers crop up every so often. In 1987, a fifty-five-year-old British woman, Kathleen Campbell, gave birth to a baby boy who was verified to be the product of natural conception – the oldest confirmed mother in the UK. Ten years later, a Welsh pensioner named Elizabeth Buttle claimed to have toppled that record by becoming pregnant naturally at age sixty. After Buttle sold her story to the News of the World tabloid, reportedly for £100,000, it came to light that she may have actually been fifty-four, and that she may have been treated at a fertility clinic – neither of which, for privacy reasons, could be definitively confirmed. Mrs Buttle referred to her son as her ‘little miracle’, and medical experts tended to agree. According to the Independent, doctors opined ‘that a natural birth to a woman of fifty-four would be exceptional but to one of sixty it would be miraculous’. The legal wife of the baby’s father could not be swayed, however; she told the world that, for her at least, miracle or not, the birth was not a cause for celebration.

Pre-teen pregnancies are even less a cause for celebration. But while women who have gone through their menopause must deliver a ‘miraculous’ egg, pre-pubescent girls simply need some errant sex hormones to activate their more than plentiful supply, waiting for fertilization. And abnormal hormonal activity, including the early onset of puberty, is not unusual and, in fact, is linked to hypothyroidism (when the thyroid gland does not make enough hormone, often caused by a diet lacking in iodine) and several other medical conditions.

Abnormal hormone levels have been known to trigger menstruation at an age when girls are still babies themselves. Take the case of the youngest mother in medical history, Lina Medina of Antacancha, Peru, who had her first period at the age of eight months. At four years old, she had clearly developed breasts and pubic hair. A little more than a year later, in 1939, when she was five years and seven months old, Lina gave birth to a healthy baby boy; she named him Gerardo after the obstetrician, Dr Géado Lozada, who had cared for her. Some in her native town likened her to the Virgin Mary; others believed her child to be the son of the Incan sun god Inti. But, despite the fact that Lina never revealed the identity of her son’s father, and sad though it may be, Gerardo was not considered by her doctors to have been conceived without sin.

Similarly, in 1957, a nine-year-old girl was taken into the University of Arkansas Medical Center in Little Rock. Her mother had noticed that her stomach was getting rather big. Examining the girl, the doctor felt a soft, movable lump, which he was convinced was a tumour. To confirm his suspicion, he performed an X-ray. But what he found was not just a lump; it turned out that the girl’s periods had started at age eight, and her breasts had started developing the year before. ‘Subsequent talks with the patient reveal this not to be an immaculate conception,’ the doctor said. Six days later, still in something of a state of shock, he noted in his records, ‘I cannot hear the foetal heart beat, but my “ovarian tumour” has definitely kicked me!’

These extreme cases still involve not just hormones but fertilization, of course. Ovarian teratomas, however, are truly immaculate ‘conceptions’, coming from eggs that at no stage have been fertilized. And yet, something happens in the body that overrides metaphase II arrest