A healthy baby boy was born in Los Angeles on August 18 after developing outside his mother’s womb—a medical anomaly occurring in about 1 in 30,000 pregnancies, doctors said. Suze Lopez, a 41-year-old nurse from Bakersfield, California, did not know she was pregnant until days before giving birth.
Lopez had been living with a basketball-sized ovarian cyst for years, monitored by doctors since her 20s. She experienced none of the usual pregnancy symptoms—no morning sickness, no fetal kicks—and her irregular periods meant she sometimes went years without one. So when her abdomen began growing earlier this year, she assumed the cyst was simply getting larger.
“It did not look like it was directly invading any organs,” said Dr. John Ozimek, medical director of labor and delivery at Cedars-Sinai, where the baby was born. “It looked like it was mostly implanted on the sidewall of the pelvis, which is also very dangerous but more manageable than being implanted in the liver.”
The pregnancy was discovered unexpectedly. Lopez needed a CT scan to evaluate the cyst, but the procedure required a pregnancy test first due to radiation exposure. To her surprise, the test came back positive. She shared the news with her husband, Andrew Lopez, at a Dodgers baseball game in August, handing him a package with a note and a onesie.
“I just saw her face,” Andrew Lopez recalled, “and she just looked like she wanted to weep and smile and cry at the same time.”
Shortly after, Lopez began feeling unwell and sought help at Cedars-Sinai. Doctors stabilized her dangerously high blood pressure and performed blood work, an ultrasound, and an MRI. The scans revealed an empty uterus but a nearly full-term fetus in an amniotic sac hidden in a small space in her abdomen, near her liver.
Dr. Cara Heuser, a maternal-fetal specialist in Utah not involved in the case, noted that almost all ectopic pregnancies—those implanting outside the uterus, most commonly in fallopian tubes—rupture and hemorrhage if not removed. A 2023 medical journal article from Ethiopia documented another abdominal pregnancy survival, but fetal mortality can reach 90% in such cases, with birth defects seen in about 1 in 5 surviving babies.
On August 18, a medical team delivered the 8-pound baby while Lopez was under full anesthesia, removing the cyst during the same surgery. She lost nearly all her blood but survived after transfusions. Doctors continually updated Andrew Lopez throughout the procedure.
“The whole time, I might have seemed calm on the outside, but I was doing nothing but praying on the inside,” he said. “It was just something that scared me half to death, knowing that at any point I could lose my wife or my child.”
Instead, both mother and son recovered well. The baby, named Ryu after a baseball player and a Street Fighter character, has been healthy and thriving. His parents love watching him interact with his 18-year-old sister, Kaila, and say he completes their family.
With Ryu’s first Christmas approaching, Lopez described feeling blessed beyond measure.
“I do believe in miracles,” she said, looking down at her baby. “God gave us this gift—the best gift ever.”
The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Department of Science Education and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. The AP is solely responsible for all content.