A woman has discovered that she has been carrying a calcified fetus around in her abdomen for the last 15 years.

The woman, who does not want to be named, had an abortion 15 years ago because her family were not in favour of having another child, reports the Metro.

Her obstetrician and gynaecologist at the time said they had carried out the abortion. But the 52-year-old went on to suffer years of abdominal pain and visited multiple doctors who gave her painkillers and pills for the acidity.

However the woman, from Nagpur, in Maharashtra, northern India, spent three years vomiting continually.

Eventually she met with a specialist, at Junankar Surgical Nursing Home, in Nagpur city, who did a CAT scan and found an obstruction in the intestines, blocking the digestive system.

Nilesh Junankar, a laparoscopic surgeon, at Junankar Surgical Nursing Home, said: ‘Her scan showed intestinal obstruction, a blockage in her food pipe along with a stone like structure. Due to this unusual report, a laparoscopy was done and to our utter surprise, there was a four-month old baby in the abdomen.

We were very shocked. It’s extremely rare.’ A team of two doctors decided to immediately operate and Dr Nilesh removed the fully grown ‘stone baby’ in a two-hour operation, on November 23.

Dr Nilesh explained: ‘It was a shock for everyone present in the operating theatre. After opening the abdomen, a fully grown ‘stone baby’.

However, her uterus, ovaries and fallopian tubes were totally normal. The patient had stopped menstruating five years back and was not in a child bearing age.’

A stone baby, or Lithopedion as it is called in medical terms, is extremely rare. Only 300 such cases have been reported in the past 400 years worldwide.

‘Since no sonography was done, neither she nor the doctors thought the baby was still there,’ Dr Nilesh added.

‘The chance of abdominal pregnancy is one in 11,000 pregnancies and only between 1.5 to 1.8 per cent of abdominal pregnancies develop into Lithopedia.

We have removed the stone baby from woman’s body and her four feet intestines have also been removed.’

The woman thanked the hospital for freeing her from a decade of pain and has since been discharged from the hospital.