AN elderly woman in Chile has been found to have a 50-year-old fetus inside her.

    The woman, who is 92, had been sent to hospital in the city of San Antonio after a fall.

    After carrying out X-rays, doctors were astonished to discover the fetus, which weighed around 4.4 pound (2 kilograms).

    The unborn child, which had calcified in her body, is a phenomenon known as a “lithopedion,” or stone baby.

    This is where an unborn child develops outside the womb and becomes calcified.

    There are fewer than 300 cases of lithopedions reported in medical literature.

    Marco Vargas Lazo, the director of the hospital, called the case “extraordinarily rare,” according to the Efe news agency.

    The fetus was “large and developed and occupied all of her abdominal cavity,” he said.

    However, given the woman’s age, doctors ruled it would be too risky to carry out an operation to remove the fetus.

    She was therefore sent home without treatment.

    The case comes after doctors in Brazil last year discovered a 44-year-old fotus inside the body of an 84-year-old Brazilian woman.

    They made the remarkable discovery after the pensioner was admitted to hospital in Natividade, Tocantins state, suffering from severe stomach pains and dizziness.

    Medics who X-rayed the senior citizen’s stomach were astonished to see the 20 to 28-week-old “stone baby” inside.

    The woman, who has not been named, told doctors there that she became pregnant 44 years ago.

    After experiencing excruciating pains she went to a witch doctor as there were no proper doctors in her village at the time.

    She claimed he prescribed her medication which almost immediately made her feel better.

    “Her stomach didn’t grow any more, the baby stopped moving and she thought it had been aborted,” Porto Nacional hospital gynaecologist Gesneria Saraiva Kratka said.

    (SD-Agencies)