A 27-year-old woman walked into an emergency department with six hours of abdominal pain and vomiting. She was 12 weeks pregnant. The ultrasound found her fetus alive and developing normally. It also found a second fetus, several inches away, outside her uterus, encased in calcium and long dead.
The case was published on July 31, 2026, in Frontiers in Medicine by a team from the College of Medicine and Sagore Dutta Hospital in Kolkata, working with clinicians in the United Kingdom. What they describe is a lithopedion, the medical term for a fetus that dies inside the abdomen and, being too large for the body to reabsorb, is gradually coated in calcium instead.
