JAMBI, INDONESIA — A 60-year-old Indonesian woman has made headlines after discovering she’d been carrying a calcified fetus for an incredible 37 years. The result of an ectopic pregnancy, the fetus had died after developing outside the womb before becoming a rock-hard mass. Surgeons at a hospital in Jambi, Sumatra operated for more than two-and-a-half hours to remove it. <br /> <br />An ectopic pregnancy occurs when a fertilized ovum attaches and develops outside the uterus. The fetus almost never survives. <br /> <br />In this case, the starved fetus died and, too large to be reabsorbed, resulted in a lithopedion, also known as a ‘stone baby’. <br /> <br />A lithopedion occurs when the mother’s body treats the the dead fetus as foreign tissue. The immune system calcifies the mass, to prevent infection. <br /> <br />With the calcification process uninterrupted for almost four decades, the fetus had become a dense, stone-like mass. <br /> <br />So-called stone babies are one of the rarest phenomena in medical science. The last recorded case occurred in China In 2013, The host mother had carried 32-week-old calcified fetus for nearly 40 years. <br /> <br />In the past 400 years, only around 300 lithopedion cases have been recorded the world over. The specimen in Jambi will be kept for research.
