Article content

A tiny percentage of modern day Americans are reporting having had virgin births, according to a new paper published in a respected medical journal Tuesday.

In the longitudinal study of adolescent health, 0.5% of the 7,870 female respondents consistently affirmed their status as virgins, yet reported a virgin birth without the use of reproductive technologies.

We apologize, but this video has failed to load.

tap here to see other videos from our team. Try refreshing your browser, or One in two hundred US women in study report having virgin births — but researchers think it's no miracle Back to video

At first, statisticians at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill thought they’d made a mistake in their analysis of their data tracking sexual development into adulthood. Turns out they didn’t, said Amy Herring, lead author of the study published in the Christmas edition of the British Medical Journal. Many of these answers remained the same over years of responses and appear to be consistent with other answers that support a life in which virginity is valued, she said.

“It wasn’t a programming error, that is how they responded,” said the professor of biostatistics in the university’s Gillings School of Global Public Health. “They did say, ‘I am a virgin,’ and they did say ‘I have had a pregnancy.'”