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Oh, baby! Virgin births reported in American health survey

Virgin births are making headlines this week — and they have nothing to do with Baby Jesus.

According to research published in the annual Christmas edition of the British Journal of Medicine, researchers discovered 45 reported virgin births among American adolescents and young adults when analyzing a long-term confidential study about reproductive health.

About 0.5 cent of the 7,870 surveyed women claimed they'd never had sex but had been pregnant.

"We didn't ask the participants, specifically, if they gave birth as a virgin. Instead, they answered a series of questions on pregnancy history and a separate series of questions on vaginal intercourse," co-author Amy H. Herring, a professor of biostatistics at UNC's Gillings School of Global Public Health, tells Live Science. "Based on [these] two sets of questions, we derived the virginity status at the time of pregnancy."

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None of these pregnancies were the result of in vitro fertilization, nor have scientists seen asexual reproduction — something that occurs in the plant world and in only a handful of vertebrates — in humans.

So, what's going on here?

"We weren't at all looking for virgin births," Herring tells ABC News. "We were analyzing data for a separate project — people who were still virgins once they were adults. But we were surprised to discover a number of them reported pregnancies. Once we confirmed these were not programming errors, we thought there were some interesting factors."

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Researchers believe that the reported virgin births bring up important questions about self-reported health data — and the need for better sex education.

"We found [the "virgin birth" phenomenon] was more common among women who signed chastity pledges or whose parents indicated lower levels of communication with their children about sex and birth control," Herring says.

In fact, 31 per cent of the women who reported a virgin pregnancy had signed a chastity pledge.

Others may have been unsure of how to classify themselves in a survey. "Born-again virgins" recommit themselves to abstinence after engaging in intercourse.

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"They reported in an earlier study a pregnancy, then later said they were virgins," says Herring. "Those may have been a misclassification issue."

"What's more, victims of abuse may be disinclined to process their experience as 'sex' per se. The study doesn't provide numbers on sexual abuse among the subjects, so we don't know how it fits into the story," writes Refinery29's Justin Sedor.

Herring agrees: "It's possible that some women may have discounted certain experiences or have chosen not to report certain experiences."

Others may have entered data like marriage and birth dates incorrectly.

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"I think that's highly unlikely, that people truly believe they are having a miraculous birth," Herring tells the National Post. "I think it's much more likely that it's mis-classification or that the respondent, for whatever reason, doesn't want to say they had intercourse."

And, yes, researchers found a few virgin fathers, too.

"That's a little harder to wrap my head around," Herring admits.

Herring says the findings raise bigger questions about studies reliant on self-reporting.

"If am analyzing diet data, is it one scoop of ice cream or the whole pint" that the individual reports, she wonders.