An American teenager is convinced that she’s pregnant, and the baby she’s carrying is Jesus Christ.
“Haley” (her last name was not revealed) appeared on the Dr. Phil show this week with her mother and sister, and made forceful, emotional statements attesting to her pregnancy despite medical evidence to the contrary.
The 19-year-old claims that she is nine months along, but home pregnancy tests and an ultrasound have all determined that she is not pregnant.
“I know my pregnancy is real. I’ve gained at least 22 pounds,” Haley said. “I was sleeping one night and my baby punched the bottom of my stomach and kicked me, and I can feel his head right here, right below my belly button.”
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Her mother, Kristi, told Dr. Phil McGraw that her daughter is “delusional” and “a compulsive liar.”
“The first time I heard her say that, she actually was saying it was Jesus Christ in her stomach. I looked at her like she had lost her mind,” Kristi said. “She was just going off into a delusional tailspin.”
Other tall tales Haley has told include a claim that rapper Eminem is her father, that she was a contestant on American Idol and that she donated a kidney to her half-brother.
Despite doctors repeatedly telling her that there is no medical evidence to prove a pregnancy, Haley will not be deterred.
“My family, my friends, my pastors at church, they don’t believe that I’m pregnant,” she said. “I know it’s Jesus. I don’t care if my family disowns me. It really comes down to if you’re a true believer in Jesus or not… I don’t care what the home pregnancy test or a doctor says, when I give birth to my baby, no one is going to deny him because he’s my saviour.”
On Nov. 3, the psychologist and talk-show host invited Dr. Travis Stork, ER physician and host of the television show The Doctors, to the program to perform an ultrasound on Haley. The results were consistent with previous medical reports.
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“The most notable thing on this ultrasound isn’t what we see, it’s what we don’t see,” Stork said.
He then compared an ultrasound of a woman at 8.5 months gestation to Haley’s; the former showed a distinct picture of an almost fully developed fetus, while Haley’s was blank.
This is not the first pregnancy in 2016 to be attributed to divine intervention.
In February, Latifah Smith-Nabengana, a 15-year-old in Cincinnati, claimed that she had been impregnated by Jesus and was carrying “Junior Jesus.” The teen was in fact pregnant, but the father of her baby remains unknown.
You can watch a clip of the ‘Dr. Phil’ segment in the video, above.