Just a head’s up—this article contains references to both sex and violence. For some that is a warning, for others an invitation. Just be aware of which kind of person you are.

This story takes place in Lesotho, a landlocked kingdom in southern Africa entirely surrounded by South Africa. It is home to one of the few ski resorts in Africa and, it, not Switzerland or Nepal, is the only country located ENTIRELY above 1,000 meters of elevation. Above is Lesotho on a map, for orientation and reference.

I heard about this on one of my favorite podcasts, Science Vs. Here is the original peer reviewed journal article. After doing some additional research, I realized that this is actually knife-adjacent, so I thought it would be worth looking into. Before we get into the details, let me summarize what might be the most astounding thing you will read today, this week, this month, or this year.

In 1988 a young woman in the African nation of Lesotho gave birth to a baby. Not a big deal. What made this astounding was this fact—because of a rare medical condition, vaginal agenesis, she was born without and never developed a vagina. You read that right—a woman born without a vagina got pregnant and gave birth to a healthy baby.

If you were like me you probably didn’t know there was a medical condition that resulted in women being born without vaginas, but it is a real thing. It is rare, about 1-in-10,000 to 1-in-15,000 females have the condition, but it is not THAT rare. This story, which was written up in a peer reviewed empirically validated medical journal, gets stranger. By happenstance she was, for the first time in her life, ovulating when she was caught in a knife fight (there is the knife tie-in) between her current and former lover. The knife fight occurred because her former lover caught her performing oral sex on her current lover. Blades were drawn, everyone was stabbed, and nine months later, a lady without a vagina gave birth to a baby.

If you weren’t staggered back from the screen you read that on, you misread what I wrote. Read it again. It is literally mindboggling using the original definitions of both “literally” and “mindboggling.”

Here is what scientists think happened. The young woman was performing oral sex on a man who ejaculated. Just as that happened, the couple was discovered and a fight broke out with the young woman receiving a series of stab wounds. The semen in her mouth traveled to her stomach, spilled out, protected by the neutral-ish PH of her saliva, and entered the space between organs in her torso. Once there and away from the powerful stomach acid, the semen happened to find a way into her uterus, which, for the first time in her life (remember—no vagina) was ovulating. Having arrived at the place it normally goes to the sperm in the semen did its thing and she became pregnant. After a normal gestation (the only thing normal in this story), she had the baby.

Aside from being a great story, I wanted to analyze the knife issues here. My experience as a criminal defense lawyer tells me that a huge number of cases with knives end in everyone being injured—the person wielding the knife, the intended target, and everyone around them. This is why there is the old adage: no one wins a knife fight. I would amend that to the following: “the winner of a knife fight is the person that loses less.” The other thing my experience tells me that that in a knife fight there are two groups of wounds—superficial slashes and deep piercing cuts or slashes. There are no shaved sections or diced or chopped body parts, just those two kinds of wounds. My guess is that this involved a lot of stabbing or piercing cuts and those cuts were really deep. Generally, I see those injuries in non-defensive, intent to kill type scenarios. So someone was really mad.

But the ironic thing here is that a blow intended to kill someone actually created an almost miraculous life. And there you have it—the most unbelievable knife-related story ever.