5 Babies Whose Existence Defies Natural Laws

5 The Virgin Prison Birth

Early last year, the news came out that a prisoner was pregnant at Turner Guilford Knight Correctional Center in Miami. Inmate Daisy Link had been behind bars for two years on a murder charge. Prisons are segregated by sex, and Link hadn’t had any kind of conjugal visit. The obvious explanation is that some guard had impregnated her, and this guard had committed a crime. Link herself implied as much. 

She went on to give birth, and a DNA test revealed who the father was. It was an inmate, Joan Depaz. And if the name “Joan” is giving any of you thoughts of someone incarcerated in a female facility who just happens to have a penis, think again: Joan can be a guy’s name, Joan Depaz is unambiguously a man and he’s incarcerated in the male section of the prison, with no apparent chance of coming face-to-face with Link.

The two have never met, but their cells are connected by vents. According to the inmates, they came to know each other by talking through these vents. They decided to have a baby together, and they managed this by Depaz storing semen in saran wrap and dropping it through the vent. Link inseminated herself using a vaginal cream applicator for yeast infections. It took several tries to become pregnant this way.

While it beggars belief that anyone could become pregnant like that, it is possible. As Link puts it, “Everybody says it to me, this is like some Lifetime Movie Network,” which also raises serious questions about what the hell Lifetime has been airing lately. 

4 Seed Extracted from a Corpse

Here’s a stock joke you can crack to make people think you’re weird: “I never knew my father. He died years before I was born.” But while that might give people a giggle (after they’ve had a second or two to think about it), it’s actually entirely possible for your father to die before you are born and even before you are conceived. 

The process is called posthumous sperm retrieval (PSR), and it involves extracting semen from a corpse. One method involves surgery, cutting out all the male bits and then salvaging what semen you can. The other involves electroejaculation. This means inserting an electric probe into the corpse’s rectum, which can get it to ejaculate after it has already died. 

It can come off (pun unavoidable) as a blessing if a couple were already trying for a baby and PSR lets the surviving partner conceive after all. But if you were cool with the idea up to this point, here’s where it gets creepy: The dead man needn’t have consented to ever becoming a father. Some countries say he has to (and some countries ban the practice altogether), but in other countries, including America, if the surviving family member asks the hospital to harvest some corpse seed, they can do it, no paternal consent required. 

Try taking a dead guy’s kidneys, and that’s something he needs to have explicitly permitted. But extracting his sperm to make a mini-him? The law’s cool with that, no questions asked. 

3 The Savior Baby

Lisa and Jack Nash had a baby named Molly who suffered from Fanconi anemia. It meant her bone marrow was probably going to fail, and she’d likely die by age 10. A marrow transplant might save her, but when it came time to choose a donor, only a sibling would do. 

So, her parents decided to make a sibling. And when they looked into options, they realized creating a sibling offered opportunities beyond painfully donating bone marrow. Cord blood (blood from the umbilical cord right after birth) could contain stem cells that would treat Molly. To make a baby that would have just the right cells, however, the couple would have to create a whole bunch of embryos, test them and then select just one, chucking out the rest.

Baby Adam was born on August 29, 2000, six years after the couple first started embryo selection. The circumstances of his birth would have been illegal in some countries, and headlines worldwide called this out as an affront against nature. But it did succeed in treating Molly, and both kids grew up happy and healthy. So, maybe the parents got this one right, and it was everyone else wanting a child to die who were the crazy ones. 

2 The Very Late Birth

We mentioned earlier the oddity of being conceived after your father died, but it’s quite possible to be born years after your father died, thanks to embryo preservation. Your parents might mash their gametes together in a petri dish while their cells are still bubbling with youth, with plans to implant the embryo sometime later, when it’s more convenient. 

And if they change their minds? They could destroy the embryo. But they could also donate the embryo to someone else who wants one. And that’s how we end up with cases like Lydia and Timothy Ridgeway, who were born 30 years after they were conceived. 

In 1992, a fertility center made an embryo from the egg of a 34-year-old woman and the sperm of a man in his 50s. The center kept the embryo in liquid nitrogen, preserving it just fine. Fifteen years later, the couple finally said the time for implanting it had passed, and another couple was welcome to the embryo, if any wanted it.

It took nearly another 15 years before one did. And so, in 2022, Rachel Ridgeway gave birth to twin boys — who had each been conceived when she herself was just three years old. 

1 The Unethical First Artificial Insemination

Every one of these stories is some version of artificial insemination. When the technique first debuted, people condemned it as unnatural, while today, it’s obviously fine, and no one knows or cares if your parents used assisted reproductive technology. But if we look at the very first successful artificial insemination, it actually deserved a lot more condemnation than it got. That’s because the patient in question never wanted to be artificially inseminated. 

The year was 1884, and the 31-year-old woman came to Philadephia’s Sansom Street Hospital for fertility treatment. The problem turned out to be that the husband had a low sperm count, but the doctor didn’t disclose that. Instead, Dr. William Pancoast saw a fine opportunity to try inseminating her with someone else’s sperm, without her knowledge.

He anesthetized her, under the guise of a mere examination. Then he gathered medical students into the room to observe. He had one of the students — the best-looking one, by Pancoast’s own estimate — produce a sperm sample and donate it for the procedure. Then he inseminated the patient, who successfully gave birth to a child nine months later. She assumed her husband was the father. 

The doctor recorded what he’d done in his notes, but he never told the patient. She died without ever learning the truth. Some would say that’s for the best. 

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