Like a Virgin (10 page)

So the
Pictorial
published a more transparent explanation under the banner,
YOU ASK WHAT EXACTLY IS A VIRGIN BIRTH
? The newspaper’s answer:

After that, just eight candidates were left.

Of the eight women who were tested further, six didn’t pass muster. The daughters had a different blood type from their mothers. Another mother–daughter pair was
thrown out because their eye colour did not match.

Only one mother and daughter remained who passed all the preliminary tests: Emmimarie and Monica Jones. They also stood up to several more sophisticated trials. For example, they shared the
ability to taste phenylthiourea, a chemical that has the unusual property of either tasting very bitter or being virtually tasteless, depending on the genetic make-up of the taster. Mother and
daughter Jones were ushered into a consulting room and required to take a sip from each cocktail glass along a long row. Monica noted that the drink in several of the glasses tasted funny;
Emmimarie thought so, too, and for the identical drinks. Monica said the experiment had been great fun; she reported to the
Pictorial
that the doctors’ rooms looked like a bar.

Then they took a substance secretor test. Around eighty percent of people with a European ancestry come up with a positive result in this test, which looks at whether or not you have the
so-called secretor factor, something like an honorary blood group. The genes that make you a secretor are found on chromosome 19, so the test was a crude way of determining whether Emmimarie and
Monica had the same genes at that location. Being a non-secretor seems to have several disadvantages. It is associated with insulin resistance syndrome, where the body becomes less efficient at
lowering blood sugar levels, and lowered levels of antibodies, which put you at greater risk of
infection and illness. Non-secretors are especially prone to
Candida
organisms, such as the yeast that causes thrush, and tend to have more problems with heart valve disturbance as a result of infections after dental work. They may also be at increased risk of
recurrent urinary tract infections and a variety of autoimmune diseases, including reactive arthritis, multiple sclerosis, and a condition called ankylosing spondylitis, which can lead to fusion of
the spine. All of which shows how a small change of one gene on one chromosome could manifest itself as a big difference between a mother and a daughter.

Now, if you are a secretor, your blood type – the classic A, B, AB or O – will show up not just in your blood, but in your saliva, sweat, tears – and in your semen, if you are
a man. If you are not a secretor, your type will not show up in these other fluids. Emmimarie and Monica were both blood type A, and the saliva of neither mother nor daughter contained substance-A
secretions. So again, Monica was indeed the spitting image of her mother.

The final preliminary test looked at patterns in the blood-serum proteins of mother and child. These proteins were separated by size, and an image created that showed the line-up of the
proteins, which could be compared. The Joneses were an identical match at every size.

But there was one final test that the pair was required to pass, should they be willing to take it. Helen Spurway saw it as the test that could provide the conclusive proof that Monica was
fatherless, and had no genes other than those of her mother. Other scientists, however, believed its results would be obscure, at best. Nevertheless, absolute secrecy was assured, because if the
doctors found out that Emmimarie Jones was not, in fact, a virgin mother, not one word would ever have been published to the world. The test in question was a skin graft.

When skin is grafted on to a body, the body’s immune system will work to reject it as a foreign body, unless the donor is
genetically similar to the recipient. This
is why many graft surgeries involve taking donor skin from another site on the person’s own body, known as an autograft, and why people who have undergone a graft from another person (who is
not an identical twin) or another species must take immunosuppressant medications long after the surgery. The test Spurway proposed was to take a piece of Monica’s skin and graft it on to
Emmimarie’s body. If the mother’s body allowed this graft to persist indefinitely, without breaking it down, that would prove they were a genetic match – that there was nothing in
Monica’s skin that was considered to be ‘alien’ to Emmimarie’s body. Spurway also realized that doing a graft the other way round, from mother to child, would not work; the
mother would have antigens, substances that her immune system would be able to protect her against, which the child did not.

Emmimarie Jones readily agreed to the operation on herself and her daughter. Monica agreed as long as she could have lots of comic books. So, shortly before Easter 1956, Emmimarie and Monica
left their English home, armed with adventure comics and destined for the secret location of their secret operation. Consultations began among the research team, blood specialists, and plastic
surgeons, and the grafts were done both ways: Emmimarie was transplanted with her daughter’s skin, while Monica wore her mother’s.

Through all of this battery of tests to find a virgin birth, Emmimarie Jones and young Monica were in good company. Theirs was simply the post-war, boom-time contribution to a
long list of virgin mothers, from saviour gods to supernatural impregnations – or so the stories go. Almost always in these
tales of virgin birth, the hand of God is
involved, and there seems to be no culture that does not tell the tale.

The pantheon of gods is populated with virgin births, in heaven and on earth. The river nymph Nana was miraculously impregnated by a falling pomegranate, and her son Attis became the lover of
Cybele, the mother of Greek gods (making Nana the grandmother of the gods). Hera, the wife of Zeus and thus the queen of heaven, renewed her virginity every year at the holy waters of Kanathos. She
spurned the unfaithful Zeus, and all mortal men, to conceive her son Hephaestus. Zeus impregnated Leto, who bore the twin gods Apollo and Artemis, just two of the many children he sired by virgins.
Artemis and her half-sister Athena were said to be virgin mothers too. Kausalya gave birth to the king Rama, the seventh avatar of the Hindu god Vishnu, after drinking nectar that had been made in
offering to the gods. The virtuous Sita, Rama’s wife, was the offspring of the land itself. Kunti of the epic Mahabharata was impregnated by the sun, Surya, when she recited a mantra that
summoned him to her for that purpose. Queen Maya of Nepal, who hadn’t become pregnant in twenty years of marriage, claimed she was spirited away in her sleep to a mystical lake, where a white
elephant, holding a lotus in its trunk, circled her and then entered her womb, to later emerge on earth as the Buddha. The Aztec Coatlicue fell pregnant with Huitzilopochtli through the touch of a
ball of feathers as she napped in a temple. In Babylonia, creation itself came about when a divine wind hovered over a female abyss called Tiamat; and Venus, the Roman goddess of love and
fertility, has been perversely worshipped as a virgin.

Pre-dating them all was Isis, the sister and wife (and in some versions the mother) of Osiris, who was fabled in Egypt for having been deflowered in her own mother’s womb, a bit like Helen
Spurway thought her guppies may have been. In the land of the pharaohs, there was also the queen Mautmes, who was
visited by the ibis-headed Thoth, the messenger of the gods,
and informed that she would bear a son, though she was a virgin. Carved on the wall of the temple of Luxor, there are scenes depicting Mautmes as she is escorted by the holy spirit Kneph and the
goddess Hathor to the
crux ansata
, the cross that symbolizes life, through which she could be impregnated with a touch of her lips. Setting aside the need to hold her mouth to the cross,
this story might sound quite familiar to anyone who has heard the tale of Mary, mother of Jesus (who was also one of many virgin mothers with a form of that name, including Myrrah, the mother of
Adonis, and Maia, mother of Hermes).

Among the ancient peoples circling the Mediterranean, the idea of a mystical birth probably gathered popularity through the veneration of a scroll about a virgin mother goddess based at Sais, an
ancient Egyptian town in the western Nile Delta. The patron deity of the town was Neith, a goddess that the Greeks, including Herodotus and Plato, would later identify with Athena, since Neith,
like Athena, was both the goddess of war and the goddess of weaving and the domestic arts. Because of this, Neith was the protector of women and a guardian of marriage. But her original role,
dating to around 3000
BCE
, was probably as a symbol of creation and fertility.

Neith was a goddess praised as a virginal mother and nurse, a mysterious mixture of virgin female and fertile mother that had great resonance among those who imagined it. So that many of the
great men – the saviours, philosophers, and conquerors – were cemented into a demi-godly status with reports that they had come into the world over which they had power through such a
birth. These virgin birth celebrities included Confucius, Plato, Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar, and Genghis Khan.

The legends of virgin birth are a counterpoint to the ancient notions of how regular babies were made. Over the thousands of years during which doctors and scientists said that women
were just a vessel for carrying babies, not a contributor in creating them, nearly anything seemed capable of making a woman pregnant. Things like exposure to the sun or the wind (as
recounted in myth) or to a fire. Or perhaps you ate pomegranates or magical fish or licked salt, like Aristotle’s mouse. Or, you made a wish, stood under a shadow, happened upon a holy spot,
or were breathed on by a god. These were all possible reasons why a woman might be pregnant, because no one understood then what was really going on.

In post-war Britain, however, there were few such illusions, and a virgin birth was, for the most part, held up as a rare, immaculate occasion, reserved for very special cases and very special
storytelling. The
Sunday Pictorial
received complaints about the story’s effect on younger readers, who it was believed were being exposed to far too many particulars about the
mechanics of sex and pregnancy. To that, one of the doctors advising the newspaper retorted that any children old enough to read the tabloid
should
know about childbirth.

Most of the angry letters, of course, came from people worried that a virgin birth involving an ordinary human would ‘undermine the character of Our Lady’s virginal conception’
and shake the foundational beliefs of people adhering to the Christian faith. The reaction from the Church was more deliberated. A Catholic publication, called
Universe
, carried a 450-word
response, printed five days after the
Pictorial
’s front-page article, that drew on scientific evidence as well as matters of faith:

Quite so.

The Church’s diplomatic handling of the issue was not an example followed in the scientific community, who were far less enthusiastic about the statistics. This remains a little
surprising, when you consider that there was actually no plausible scientific explanation at that time for why women should not be able to reproduce without men. In the lab, after all, scientists
had already succeeded in inducing pregnancy in rabbits without mating. The researchers had discovered that all it took was cooling down the Fallopian tubes, the tubes that connect the ovaries to
the womb. Yet, a
Lancet
report that appeared around the time of the tabloid search declared, ‘No “reasonable man” would even entertain the possibility that a woman might
become pregnant without a single sperm entering her uterus.’