She Was Pregnant For 46 Years And Never Gave Birth!

Extraordinary People recently published a scientific article about a Moroccan woman, Zahra Aboutalib, and her 46 year pregnancy that sounds too outlandish to be true… but it is!

Having already endured 48 painful hours of labor, Zahra was rushed to a hospital for an emergency Cesarean section.  After seeing a woman on the ward die in child birth, she got scared and fled the hospital.  Her labor pains continued but the baby was never born. A few days later, the pains finally stopped and the baby quit moving.

Logically, the next sentence should say something like “she had a miscarriage,” but that's not how the story goes. The truth is much more fascinating and difficult to believe.

Years later, when Zahra was age 75, the pains returned and her concerned son took her to see a specialist.  The doctor suspected that her swollen stomach was hiding and ovarian tumor and immediately scheduled her for an ultrasound scan.  The scan revealed a large mass. The specialist didn't know what to make of the mass, so he sent Zahra for a detailed MRI.

Shockingly, the MRI revealed that the calcified mass the doctor had detected was actually the baby she had conceived 46 years ago!

Crazy, right? After reading that last line I started looking for the author of the article, fully expecting that it had originally appeared on a satirical site like The Onion.

How could anyone carry a fetus for 46 years? The explanation is pretty unbelievable and a little bit heartbreaking.

Zahra had an ectopic pregnancy.

The fetus burst the fallopian tube and continued to develop in the abdomen. It survived by attaching it’s placenta to vital organs around her stomach.

When doctors operated on Zahra, they discovered the remains of her ectopic pregnancy: a calcified stone baby.

In an ectopic pregnancy, if the dead fetus is too large to be re-absorbed by the mother’s body it becomes a foreign body to the mother’s immune system. To protect itself from possible infection the mother’s body will encase the fetus in a calciferous substance as the tissues die and dehydrate.

As the calciferous wall builds up, the fetus is gradually mummified becoming a stone baby.

To see the real-life stone baby for yourself, get more information about Zarhra and her medical miracle at Extraordinary People.