About One in Two Hundred Women Report Having Had Virgin Births, According to New Research
What category to put this under? health, education, ignorance???
A tiny slice of modern day Americans are reporting having had virgin births, according to a new paper published in a respected medical journal Tuesday.
In the longitudinal study of adolescent health, 0.5% of the 7,870 female respondents consistently affirmed their status as virgins, yet reported a virgin birth without the use of reproductive technologies.
At first, statisticians at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill thought they’d made a mistake in their analysis of their data tracking sexual development into adulthood. Turns out they didn’t, said Amy Herring, lead author of the study published in the Christmas edition of the British Medical Journal. Many of these answers remained the same over years of responses and appear to be consistent with other answers that support a life in which virginity is valued, she said.
“It wasn’t a programming error, that is how they responded,” said the professor of biostatistics in the university’s Gillings School of Global Public Health. “They did say, ‘I am a virgin,’ and they did say ‘I have had a pregnancy.’”
More: About One in Two Hundred Women Report Having Had Virgin Births, According to New Research
Herring thought it was an important issue, but also thought it might work for the BMJ (formerly British Medical Journal) Christmas issue, which publishes tongue-in-cheek medical studies. “We also thought it fit nicely with the Christmas theme,” Herring told NBC News.
Virgin birth is not unknown in nature. It’s known as parthenogenesis and it’s been documented in snakes, sharks, and Komodo dragons.
But science has never demonstrated a human case of parthenogenesis. Herring thinks it may all be a mistake. “It’s self-reported pregnancy,” she says. And the survey, given by computer so the women and girls would feel free to answer questions honestly, didn’t follow up and ask them “Are you sure?” if they reported having had a baby yet not ever having had sex.
Social pressure could have made the women reluctant to admit they had sex, or it could be they were confused about where babies come from, Herring says. About a third of the women who reported virgin births said they had signed a virginity pledge, compared to 15 percent of all women who had babies.