Sperm in Swimming Pool

Claim:   While swimming in a community pool, a girl is impregnated by sperm ejaculated into the water by male swimmers.

Status:   False.

Example:   [Collected on the Internet, 1993]

I vaguely remember a legal case from 20-30 years ago in which a young girl sued and won judgement from a municipal swimming pool when she became pregnant. An intact virgin, she was being harrassed by a group of boys who ejaculated in the pool. (Nice kids). The pool was sued for not protecting the girl from the boys and because the pool was not sufficiently chlorinated. I make no arguments for this, just reporting what I read many many years ago. (For those claiming this to be some kind of urban legend, I do remember reading it.)

Origins:   Another one of those silly, impossible stories nearly everyone heard as a child, a companion piece to the persistent adolescent legend that a girl cannot become pregnant through having sex in a chlorinated swimming pool and the tale of a woman's becoming pregnant from bathing in water into which a man has ejaculated.

In July 2009 a suit was brought against an Egyptian hotel by a woman claiming her 13-year-old daughter got pregnant from using its swimming pool.

Last updated:   12 July 2009

  Sources:

    Brunvand, Jan Harold.   The Choking Doberman.

    New York: W. W. Norton, 1984.   ISBN 0-393-30321-7   (p. 110).

    Doyle, Hayley.   "Teen Pregnant After 'Swimming in Pool.'"

    The Sun.   9 July 2009.

    Hegarty, Stephen.   "Students Interested in What Else? Sex."

    St. Petersburg Times.   14 April 1991   (p. A1).