50-Year-Old Stone Fetus Found Inside 92-Year-Old Woman’s Body

Doctors discovered a 50-year-old mummified stone fetus inside the abdomen of a 92-year-old Chilean woman when she went to a hospital after suffering injuries during a fall.

X-rays taken at the Chilean hospital in San Antonio showed a 4.4 pound stone fetus inside the woman’s abdomen and outside her womb. Doctor’s think the large fetus that occupied all of her abdominal cavity was seven months old at the time of death, according to the Independent.

The phenomenon, although rare, has been recorded before.

It’s called “lithopedion,” and happens when a fetus forms in the abdomen rather than the uterus. After the fetus eventually dies from a lack of blood, the body is unable to expel it.

The woman’s body then calcifies the fetus to protect her, just as it would any other foreign object.

Doctors don’t plan on removing the Chilean woman’s stone baby due to her age. She has since been released from the hospital and sent home.

Hospital Director Marco Vargas Lazo called the case “extraordinarily rare,” according to the Efe news agency. That’s because modern medicine usually identifies issues that lead to the “lithopedion” before it can form.

The calcifying of a fetus has only happened 330 times in recorded medical history, according to the U.S. National Library of Medicine. It’s not unusual for women diagnosed with this occurrence to not realize they’re pregnant till years or decades later.

A study in the San Paulo Medical Journal discovered that two thirds of women diagnosed with carrying a “lithopedion” were over 40 and kept the baby inside their bodies from 4 to 60 years.

In 2014, an 84-year-old Brazilian woman was diagnosed with carrying a “lithopedion” for 44 years after she was admitted to the hospital with stomach pains from indigestion, according to the International Business Times.

This time the woman had realized she was pregnant, but thought the fetus had been aborted after she felt intense stomach pain and the fetus stopped growing. The woman refused to let doctors remove her stone baby.

Then, in 2013, an elderly Colombian woman made news headlines when doctors discovered she had been carrying a stone fetus inside her body for 40 years.

The woman went to the hospital complaining of stomach pain, and an abdomen X-ray revealed the stone baby inside her. She was originally diagnosed with gastroenteritis.

This time doctors removed the calcified fetus, according to the Inquisitr.

[Photo by Joe Raedle / Getty Images]