Pregnant without having sex

You can get pregnant without having sexual intercourse. While ideally, semen should be deposited as close to the cervix as possible to get pregnant as it would be after vaginal intercourse , you can conceive as long as semen gets anywhere near the vagina or vaginal opening. This may occur if a man ejaculates outside the vagina, or it can occur if semen gets on someone's fingers and those fingers are placed near or inside the vagina. Pregnancy may also occur without ejaculation if the erect penis comes into contact with the vaginal area. A small amount of semen—just a drop or two—is excreted when a man gets an erection.

The results of a long-term study of reproductive health, published in the British Medical Journal , have revealed that one in two hundred US women claim to have given birth without ever having had sexual intercourse. The findings were based on a study of 7, women and girls aged 15 to 28, as part of the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health, which ran from to The Christmas issue of the BMJ reports that, of the women who took part in the study, 45 0. In short, they claimed to have conceived - yet had not had vaginal intercourse or in-vitro fertilisation IVF. The BMJ article notes that virgin births, or parthenogenesis from the Greek parthenos for virgin and genesis for birth , can occur in non-humans as a consequence of "asexual reproduction, where growth and development of the embryo occurs without fertilization". For the study of putative virgin pregnancies, researchers at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill analyzed data from the thousands of teenage girls and young women who took part in the long-running study.

Honestly, we all probably asked this question about a million times during our preteen or adolescent years. In case you missed sex education class, let's briefly go over how getting pregnant works. The most common way a person gets pregnant is through unprotected vaginal intercourse, when the penis ejaculates semen into the vagina. The semen contains sperm, which travel up the vaginal canal, through the cervix, and into the uterus. If there's an egg present, then the sperm can fertilize it.

Do you remember hearing about that friend of a friend who got pregnant just by kissing in a hot tub? While that ended up being an urban legend, you may be surprised to learn you actually can get pregnant without having penetrative sex. Related: Teenage Pregnancy. The answer is — yes! The process is typically pretty straightforward.