The 44-year-old fetus that was found in an 84-year-old Brazilian woman had died during pregnancy at the age of 20 to 28 weeks but was not aborted. X-rays of the fetus taken at a hospital in the Tocantins state in central Brazil showed the unborn baby’s face, bones of the arms, of the legs, the ribs, and the spine,” reported Opposing Views on Feb. 13, 2014.
The story behind the 44-year-old fetus is the story of the 84-year-old Brazilian woman who remembers that she became pregnant when she was 40.
During her pregnancy, she consulted a witch doctor because she was experiencing pain and there were no other doctors in her village. The witch doctor gave her a potion, and after drinking it, the pain went away.
For the next four decades, the Brazilian woman believed that she had aborted the baby.
However, when she had to go to see doctors at the hospital in central Brazil because of stomach pains, doctors discovered that the old woman had been carrying her five-month-old dead baby for 44 years.
When the five-month-old baby died during pregnancy, it was not aborted but was instead calcified after it had stopped moving.
“When this occurs, the body covers the fetus in calcium to protect the [mother's] body from the fetal corpse. The result is a ‘stone baby,’ a condition known as lithopedion.”
A lithopedion, aka “stone baby,” is a rare instance but can occur if a fetus dies during an abdominal pregnancy. According to a MadSci Network description, “these cases seem to arise from rare abdominal pregnancies in which the fetus is too large to be resorbed by the body.” After the unborn dies and stops moving, the calcification of the fetus protects the mother’s body from the dead tissue of the baby and prevents an infection.
While most abortions occur during the first 12 weeks, a lithopedion can develop from 14 weeks gestation to full term. Because the mother’s body adjusts to the calcified stone baby, it is not unusual to remain undiagnosed until the mother returns to the hospital; usually for some apparently unrelated pain – as in the case of the 84-year-old Brazilian woman.
The above video reports that last year, an 82-year-old woman in Bogota, Colombia, went to the hospital for abdominal pain, and doctors discovered a 40-year-old fetus. There are only about 300 reported cases of stone babies in medical history. The Colombian woman opted for the removal of the fetus.
In regard to the 44-year-old fetus found in the 84-year-old Brazilian woman, Porto Nacional hospital gynecologist Gesneria Saraiva Kratka said that “it's supernatural, but she has not had any complications. We are going to perform some new tests, scans to see more details and then we will speak with her relatives to see if they allow us to operate.” The Brazilian woman reportedly “doesn’t want the baby to be removed.”