In Russia, a mother gave birth to a “miracle” baby girl who grew entirely in her abdomen.

Evgenia Baturina, 37, wasn’t aware that she was pregnant until 33 weeks, and that the baby is growing outside her womb.

Despite this, Baturina delivered the healthy baby girl via caesarean-section, with the baby just weighing just under 5lbs. She was told by the medical personnel that her case is the 17th only known in the world where a child has survived an abdominal pregnancy.

“This does not happen, it just does not happen,” Galina Nikonova, the head of perinatal doctors in the Voronezh hospital where the child was delivered has said. “Suddenly we get a full-term baby where she should not live.”

“The girl was located in the foetal membranes,” Nikonova explained. “She had a placenta, which was located between the ovary and the Fallopian tube.”

“The fact that the girl has developed outside the uterus and grown to 2.13 kg is a miracle,” Nikonova said. “I have been working for 44 years, but this is the first time I see that a child born alive and almost full-term in such circumstances.”

Baturina said that she was “very lucky” to successfully carry and deliver the baby, named Anastasia,  who measured 18 inches at birth.

“I’ve always had a tummy,” Baturina, who works as a pastry chef, has said. “I just thought it had got a bit bigger as usual.”

“I work from home and somehow did not pay much attention to my increasing size,” she said.

Baturina added that she felt strong abdominal pains so she went to her local hospital.

“I felt bad, I was suffering pain,” she said. “It became serious, it hurt.”

While her pregnancy was confirmed by the hospital, the ultrasound scan did not spot the 33-week foetus, and it was later on revealed that it was entirely outside Baturina’s womb.

By the 36th week of her pregnancy, the abdominal bleeding began and Baturina was in pain.

The mother was then sent to Voronezh Perinatal Centre in the regional capital of Russia where a one-and-a-half-hour emergency Caesarean revealed the true nature of her pregnancy.

“We can say the woman was very lucky because the placenta did not affect nearby vital organs, attached only to the uterine appendages,” chief obstetrician Dr Tatyana Gushchina said. “If it had been attached to the intestine, or the omentum, or other organs, then this surgery would have been much more traumatic.”

The chance that the mother and child are healthy with this kind of pregnancy was “one in a billion”, Gushchina said.

During the birth, Baturina said she lost three litres of blood.

“Of course, I was shocked, and I am still shocked,” she said.

According to Chief neonatologist Lyudmila Ippolitova, the newborn girl did not show any symptoms that she was “very uncomfortable” during the pregnancy or that there were problems in her development.

“The child did not require our serious intervention after birth,” Ippolitova said.

The doctors said that despite her previous case, Baturina will still be able to give birth normally in future.