Doctors discover 50-year-old fetus inside woman's abdomen

Updated
Doctors Find 50-Year-Old Fetus Inside Woman
Doctors Find 50-Year-Old Fetus Inside Woman


Doctors in Chile discovered 50-year-old fetus inside a woman's abdomen.

The BBC reports the woman, who is said to be in her 90s, went to the hospital after a nasty fall and that's where doctors learned via X-ray that she had the decades-old fetus inside.

The phenomenon is known as a lithopedion and occurs when a fetus dies during pregnancy and then becomes calcified outside the uterus, allowing it to stay in the body.

Doctors say they sent the woman home and do not plan on removing the fetus because operating on a patient her age may be too risky.

It's rare, but we've seen cases like this happen all over the world.

In 2013, a woman in Colombia went to the hospital in Bogota where doctors found that she had been carrying around a calcified fetus for 40 years.

If you want something weirder, the same year a 2-year-old boy in China gave birth to his undeveloped fetus of a twin. His parents took him to the hospital when he began having stomach pains and they removed the fetus from his abdominal cavity with emergency surgery.

In 2009, a 92-year-old woman in China delivered a fetus she'd been carrying for 60 years.

In 2008, a 9-year-old girl in Greece was diagnosed with a tumor that turned out to be the undeveloped embryo of her parasitic twin.

Advertisement