This is not a typo. A resident of a small Moroccan village has been pregnant for almost half a century.
Back in 1955, Zara Abutalib was only 26 years old. The girl got married not so long ago and was now expecting her first child. The birth began prematurely, it went hard and badly. After 48 hours of torture, Zara was taken to a local hospital. The doctor told her she would need a cesarean section. She herself will not give birth. But Zara did not wait for the operation: she saw how a woman was tormented in the maternity ward and eventually died. Let’s make a reservation: Zara lived in a small village, the hospital was, to put it mildly, very simple. The woman was so scared that she ran home from the hospital.
Then something very strange happened: the contractions continued for several more days, and then subsided. The pains stopped. The child did not move any more. He remained in the womb.
Here we have to make a lyrical digression. The fact is that in Moroccan culture there is a belief: an unborn child can fall asleep in a mother’s womb in order to protect his and her honor. Any of us will think that this is just a stupid myth, but Zara took it very seriously. She just forgot that she was pregnant at all. Later she adopted three children, raised them, and became a grandmother.
When Zara turned 75, abdominal pains suddenly returned. Her son took his mother to the hospital – not to the local one, but to the capital. The doctor decided that it was most likely a tumor, and sent the woman for an ultrasound scan. The device showed that there really is something in Zara’s stomach. But what? In an attempt to understand what is causing the woman terrible pain, the patient was sent for an x-ray. The picture showed that there is some kind of calcium formation in Zara’s stomach. But there are no such bones in the skeleton! And only MRI made it possible to solve the riddle: in Zara’s stomach there was that very child who was never born 49 years ago.
It turned out that the pregnancy was ectopic. The fallopian tube ruptured and the fetus continued to develop in the abdomen. When Zara escaped from the hospital, the fetus died. The body identified it as a foreign body and turned the immune system against it. To protect itself from possible infection, Zara’s body imprisoned the unborn child in a calcium cocoon. As a result, the tissues of the fetus were dehydrated – the child turned into a mummy. Experts call this phenomenon lithopedia, and “mummy” – lithopedion. That is, a stone baby.
Zarya underwent surgery. Surgeons removed the tumor from the woman’s abdomen for four hours. The operation was successful.
Zara’s case is not the only one in medical history. There have already been precedents: from the body of an 84-year-old woman, a baby was removed, which she had been carrying for 40 years. And the 92-year-old Chilean woman wore the “stone child” for more than half a century.