It’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas, as all across America trees are decorated with tinsel and baubles, festive lights are lit, carols sung, children wait expectantly to hear Santa on his sleigh, and virgins miraculously announce they have given birth.

Wait, what?

Yes, apparently the USA is a hot bed (or should that be manger?) of virgin births. This according to a long-term study on reproductive health, published by the British Medical Journal, which states that one in 200 American women claim to have given birth without every having had sexual intercourse!

These miraculous findings come from a study of 7,870 women and girls, aged between 15 and 28, who were interviewed as part of the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health, between 1995 and 2009.

It seems that Jesus Christ may have quite a few half-brothers and half-sisters across the land, as 45 (0.5%) out of all the women who took part, said they had at least one virgin pregnancy, “unrelated to the use of assisted reproductive technology.”

At least one?

That is they conceived without “vaginal intercourse or in-vitro fertilization (IVF).”

Peter Cook and Dudley Moore once jested that conception occurred after a wife sat down in a chair recently vacated by a husband, but whether or not these 45 virgin births involved an easy chair, we are not told. However, the The Independent reports “researchers at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill analyzed data from the thousands of teenage girls and young women” and discovered some interesting similarities:

They found that the girls who had become pregnant, despite claiming they had never had sex at the time of conception, shared some common characteristics.

Thirty-one percent of the girls had signed a so-called ‘chastity pledge’, whereby they vow—usually for religious reasons—not to have sex. Fifteen percent of non-virgins who became pregnant also said they had signed such pledges.

The 45 self-described virgins who reported having become pregnant and the 36 who gave birth were also more likely than non-virgins to say their parents never or rarely talked to them about sex and birth control.

About 28 percent of the “virgin” mothers’ parents (who were also interviewed) indicated they didn’t have enough knowledge to discuss sex and contraception with their daughters, compared to 5 percent of the parents of girls who became pregnant and said they had had intercourse.

The authors of the study—titled “Like a virgin (mother)”—say that such scientifically impossible claims show researchers must take care in interpreting self-reported behavior. Fallible memory, beliefs and wishes can cause people to err in what they tell scientists.

Perhaps we should wait and see if any of these virgin births grow-up and start their own religion. Meantime, virgins should not sit in any recently vacated chairs…
 

 
H/T The Independent