A 22 year old Colombian woman who used a potato as a contraceptive has been hospitalized after it grew roots.
The woman would seek medical attention after incurring severe stomach pain (you think?) after admitting to doctors that she had lodged a potato inside her vagina.
According to a report via Colombia Reports, by the time doctors discovered the potato, it had apparently germinated and grown roots inside her.
The journal claims the unnamed woman told doctors: ‘My mum told me that if I didn’t want to get pregnant, I should put a potato up there, and I believed her.’
The discovery was made when the woman, from the central Colombian town of Honda, went to hospital complaining of abdominal pains.
When a nurse examined her, she found roots from the potato that had grown.
Fortunately upon removing the potato, doctors confirmed there would be no lasting damage to the woman’s health.
Medical staff at the hospital have since criticised the woman’s mother for the terrible contraceptive advice.
The bizarre case sheds light on a lack of sex education, despite it being mandatory in the South American country.
The UK’s dailymail notes research conducted by the Colombian Institute of Family Welfare – to try and reduce high levels of teenage pregnancy – found a startling lack of awareness about contraception in young people.
Girls are often pressured into having unsafe sex, the campaign found.
Maria Eugenia Rosselli, the Colombian Ministry of Education sociologist was reported said the lack of ‘sex talk’ between young people and their parents had created a void of information.
This, in turn, had created high levels of sexually transmitted diseases and unwanted pregnancies and of course some very unique and desperate measures to ward off the stigma of unwanted pregnancies…
