A British teenager said she was in "total shock" to learn that she had been born without a vagina.
During a routine visit to the doctor, Jacqui Beck, 17, mentioned that she hadn't started getting her periods. Tests soon showed that she had MRKH syndrome, a genetic condition that meant she had been born without a vagina, womb or cervix.
"I left the doctor's [office] in tears. I would never know what it was like to give birth, be pregnant, have a period. All the things I had imagined doing suddenly got erased from my future,"
Beck told the Daily Mail. "I was really angry and felt like I wasn’t a real woman any more."
Shocking as it may seem, Beck is not alone. In fact, her condition isn't even especially rare. According to the National Institutes of Health, Mayer-Rokitansky-Küster-Hauser syndrome (named for the physicians that first diagnosed it), or MRKH, affects one in 4,500 newborn girls.
The condition mainly affects the reproductive system and "causes the vagina and uterus to be underdeveloped or absent." According to the NIH, it mostly occurs in people with no family history of the disorder.