Because the other day I was talking to some coworkers about calcified baby, and they claimed not to know about calcified baby, and that just seemed wrong to me. EVERYONE SHOULD KNOW ABOUT CALCIFIED BABY.

A Lithopedion (Greek:litho = stone; pedion = child), or stone baby, is a rare phenomenon which occurs most commonly when a fetus dies during an ectopic pregnancy, is too large to be reabsorbed by the body, and calcifies on the outside, shielding the mother’s body from the dead tissue of the baby and preventing infection. Lithopedia may occur from 14 weeks’ gestation to full term. It is not unusual for a stone baby to remain undiagnosed for decades, and it is often not until a patient is examined for other conditions or a proper examination is conducted that includes an X-ray that a stone baby is found. The oldest reported case is that of a 76 year old woman, whose lithopedion could have been present for approximately 46 years.

Fewer than 300 cases have been noted in 400 years of medical literature.

The earliest stone baby is one found in an archaeological excavation, dated to 1100 BC. The condition was first described in a treatise by the physician Albucasis in the 10th century AD.

And:

The patient is a 37-year-old Zairian female who lives in a village of Malongo at the headwaters of the Congo River. She presented with a relatively asymptomatic large abdominal mass…In further questioning the patient, she stated that she had been pregnant about three years ago and everything seemed to be going fine, but “the baby never came out.”

Pictures of stone baby after the jump.

littledickens.JPG

Just kidding, pics of stone baby are totally gross. I wouldn’t do that to you. But if you want to see some, click here.

Lindy West was born an unremarkable female baby in Seattle, Washington. The former Stranger writer covered movies, movie stars, exclamation points, lady stuff, large frightening fish, and much, much more....

22 replies on “Do You Guys Know About Calcified Baby?”

  6. @2
    FETUS.
    FETUS.
    FETUS.
    Keep that silly shit in Britain with your encyclopaedias and paedophiles and all of your other silly vowel pairings.

  10. That is so incredibly awesome and yet horrifying at the same time. I’m not going to say that I want one, but… If I were unlucky enough to have one, I’d try and display the thing on my mantelpiece. Because, really, bad taste just flies out the window when it’s something that damn weird.

  14. I don’t know about “intelligent design” but I’d say this is some evolutionary brilliance:

    “…calcifies on the outside, shielding the mother’s body from the dead tissue of the baby and preventing infection.”

    It’s amazing these processes… I don’t know why people would have a strong reaction to the link that shows an actual lithopedion. It is remarkable that the body has processes to protect mothers against infection in such an instance. In that sense, it is quite beautiful. Try not to think about it as a “dead baby” but as evidence of the brilliance of evolutionary design.

    And if you have to think of it as “intelligent design”, so be it, everyone has their own perspective. Either side of the fence, it’s remarkable.

    Let’s not be so freaked out about reproductive processes. This is a part of the “miracle” of life.

  15. Every once in a while I learn about something and I just have to say, “dude, that is fuuuuuuuuuucked up.”

    This, obviously, is one of those times.

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