Woman Delivers a ‘Stone Baby’ After 60 Year Pregnancy
Huang Yijun, aged 92, is from southern China and she recently made news after delivering a baby known as a lithopedion, aka ‘Stone Baby’.
Huang Yijun
told the press she didn’t have the money to have her fetus removed after
doctors told her it had died inside her in 1948.
So she
simply did nothing at all about it.
Lithopedion
is a very rare medical phenomenon, which occurs when a pregnancy fails
and the
fetus actually calcifies while still in the mother’s body.
Medically
speaking, what often happens is the implanted fetus gets to an advanced
stage
before it dies. Too large to be absorbed by the body, the remains of the
child
or its surrounding amniotic sac slowly calcify, turning to stone as a
way to
protect the woman’s body from infection from the decomposing tissue.
If no
complications occur, believe it or not, the mother can basically just go
on
with her life.
According
to the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine, only 290 cases of
lithopedions
have ever been documented by medical literature.
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