Reproduction, by its very nature, is typically the biological process in which a male impregnates a female by fertilizing her egg during the act of sexual intercourse. Of course, there’s more than one way to make an omelet, so to speak, whether by in vitro fertilization or intrauterine insemination or what have you. So, if Jane the Virgin has taught us anything, it is technically possible—though highly unlikely—for a virgin to get pregnant, as one formerly pregnant virgin recently revealed on TikTok.
In the quirky video, Samantha Lynn Isabel, now 26, revealed that at 19, she noticed that her period was late and was feeling otherwise crampy and off, so she took a pregnancy test—despite the fact that she and her boyfriend had never had penetrative sex and she was a virgin.
To Isabel’s shock, when not one, but six more pregnancy tests came back positive, she saw her doctor, who confirmed the surprising news. “And that is how I have a 5-year-old son,” Isabel revealed in the post.
As Isabel later revealed to BuzzFeed, though she and her boyfriend had indeed not had penis-vagina sex, they had done … hand stuff, which somehow resulted in her becoming impregnated.
“Sperm has to get into a vagina in order for pregnancy to happen,” a gynecologist named Dr. Jennifer Lincoln likewise told BuzzFeed. “It doesn’t matter what puts it there—whether it’s a penis, finger, turkey baster, you name it—but once it’s there, it can travel through the cervix, into the uterus, and rendezvous with an egg in the fallopian tube and fertilize it.”
“With fingering, if some semen is on the fingers that touch or enter a vagina, the amount is likely lower than with penetrative sex,” Lincoln added. “But like I’ve said before, it only takes one sperm that’s in the right place at the right time!”
For what it’s worth, Isabel’s story has a happy ending. She and her boyfriend Alex are still together, and five-year-old Bentley, as they named their miracle baby, now has a one-year-old brother named Theo.
Though Theo “was conceived the traditional way,” Isabel jokes that, “to this day,” some of her friends and family still call her “The Virgin Mary”—which, all things considered, seems more than fair.
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