Mystical Pregnancy

Qui-Gon Jinn: The Force is unusually strong with him, that much is clear. Who was his father?
Shmi Skywalker: There was no father that I know of. I carried him, I gave birth to him. I raised him. I can't explain what happened.

— The Phantom Menace

When a character's pregnancy is complicated by supernatural means — be it Bizarre Alien Biology, Functional Magic, or even through a Mad Scientist. There are three ways this could work:

• Supernatural conception: The pregnancy is unnatural from the very beginning, such as Jesus's conception in the Gospels of Matthew and Luke. Half Human Hybrids and pregnant men are examples of this. This is normally a good time to exclaim "But I Can't Be Pregnant!," where there is understandable reason to be surprised about the pregnancy. This can occur if a woman makes a deal using her firstborn when she believes she is infertile.
• Supernatural pregnancy: The baby is conceived normally, but during pregnancy something mystical happens to the mother and/or the fetus. Unfortunate women subjected to experimentation either through a Mad Scientist or a Back-Alley Doctor or a Face Full of Alien Wing-Wong can end up with this.
• Both: The baby is conceived and carried to term through supernatural means.

This trope is a good way to give rise to empowered children; depending on the pregnancy and the supernatural means involved a mother could also birth a Fetus Terrible. However, there's also a large possibility that the Phlebotinum involved could kill the mother as well. A Mystical Pregnancy could result in a Truly Single Parent if conception can be done solo.

This trope is Older Than Dirt, with weird pregnancies present in some of the oldest mythologies.

Feminist criticisms of this trope center around the female character's loss of agency, as well as the use of women's reproductive capabilities as a means to terrify, humiliate, and degrade women, or reducing them to a passive set of reproductive organs. If deities are involved, it may raise some interesting questions about whether or not a mortal could truly consent to a Divine Date with The Powers That Be. (Even if no actual sex took place between the deity and the human that got pregnant.) An event as traumatic as a Mystical Pregnancy could tremendously affect a person, but the character's emotional aftermath has rarely ever been touched upon.

Compare Wonder Child, which is usually a sort of Mystical Adoption rather than the result of pregnancy, though it can overlap. Praying to a Fertility God is one's best chance at getting (consensually) blessed with this. Also compare Designer Babies, which swap science for magic in creating an unusual child.

Super-Trope to:

• Bizarre Baby Boom
• Truly Single Parent
• Extra Parent Conception
• Fetus Terrible
• Madonna Archetype

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Examples:

Anime & Manga

• Berserk:
  • Guts and Casca's child, conceived in their moment of love by the waterfall, was corrupted by the demonic seed of the newly-born Femto, who raped Casca during the events of the Eclipse.
  • From the same series, Ganishka's demon-soldiers are created by dropping heavily-pregnant women into vats of demonically-charged amniotic fluid which instantly corrupts and mutates the foetus into a demon, who then claws and bites his way out of the womb.
• Fairy Tail: Irene conceived an ordinary child with her husband, but after she was struck with a certain affliction that began to transform her body, she cast an enchantment on her unborn baby to keep it from growing in her womb, or else the child would suffer the same affliction. That baby was Erza Scarlet, and since Irene's affliction had turned her into a dragon, her birth was postponed for four-hundred years until Zeref gave her a human figure again.
• Fire Force: Neither Shinra nor Sho have a father and are revealed to have been virgin births. Sho concludes that he is the embodiment of humanity's belief in guardian angels and his purpose is to guide his brother to victory.
• In the 3rd OVA to Fushigi Yuugi, Miaka and Tamahome conceive a baby on their wedding night. Three months later, Mayo finds the Book of the Four Gods again, and the pregnancy is supernaturally transferred to Mayo ^note  Who is 16 years old, has no boyfriend to speak of, and is presumably a virgin. (while Miaka goes into a coma), because Mayo has such strong feelings for Tamahome. (She takes full advantage of the pregnancy and her status as Priestess, much to Tamahome's dismay.) Even though it seems all is lost, it's actually a Xanatos Gambit on the part of Miaka, in order to save the Universe of the Four Gods. After the fetus is used as a Living Macguffin in a Metaphysical Place to summon Suzaku, the baby is transferred back into Miaka, who wakes up and the pregnancy continues normally. (Mayo, too, goes on to live a normal life.)
• In Her Majesty's Dog (Joou-sama no Inu), Amane's biological father used his supernatural abilities to throw a powerful spirit into her mother's womb while she was pregnant in order to secure a powerful heir for the family of kotodama users. Her mother believed this spirit killed her real daughter and hated her as a result.
• JoJo's Bizarre Adventure:
  • Golden Wind: The circumstances of Diavolo's birth were very strange, to say the least. His mother had no visible signs of pregnancy right up until she went into labor, and the father had been dead for more than two years beforehand. His eyes were open the whole time, and he didn't cry at all. Strangest of all, his eyes flickered from brown to red and back again.
  • Steel Ball Run: While hiding from Funny Valentine, Lucy Steel sees a brief light emerge from a chimney before getting engulfed by it, causing Lucy to become pregnant with the Corpse of the Saint.
• Naruto:
  • Female jinchuuriki have pregnancies that last ten months, during which the seal binding the bijuu to their body weakens to the point that a seal master has to prevent it breaking during the birth. At least one child born this way also had a distinct birthmark as a result, namely Naruto's whiskers.
  • Shukaku was sealed into Gaara while his mother was still pregnant with him. Yashamaru claims the sealing drove her insane and ultimately was responsible for her death. Gaara was actually born premature and she died due to the strain.
• The Mother of the Great Demon King's 10 Children in Another World: all of Akari's pregnancies are the results of various kinds of magic, so even after having six kids she's technically still a virgin. And each of the pregnancies themselves last only a couple of minutes before the baby is born. Averted with her sixth pregnancy, however, which occurred the old-fashioned way).
• World's End Harem: Fantasia: Arc and Wenna find out the hard way that if he has unprotected sex with a woman he's infused with Macht, she's virtually guaranteed to become pregnant as a result.

Comic Books

• The plot of the comic book series America's Got Powers begins when an alien crystal falls to Earth and gives off a burst of energy. All of the pregnant women within range, regardless of how far along they were, immediately give birth to fully-developed, healthy, super-powered babies.
• The Avengers:
  • The infamous "Rape of Ms. Marvel" in issue #200. Carol Danvers is mind raped in Limbo by Marcus, son of Immortus, into falling in love with him and he impregnates her with his own essence. He is born on Earth and rapidly ages to adulthood. He has to return to Limbo to survive and Carol goes with him. The Avengers beamingly voice their approval as if this is a wonderful thing instead of a horrifying violation of her mind and body — though it has generally been assumed since that they were also Mind Raped into going along with it, even if Carol was deeply skeptical when she reamed them out for it.
  • The Vision and Scarlet Witch are married, but can't have kids, what with him being a Ridiculously Human Robot, so instead, she gets pregnant by channeling raw magic into her. It actually gets weirder once the kids are born, with the ultimate reveal that her children are actually soul-shards taken from Mephisto, one of Marvel's expies of Satan. Grief ended up driving her insane, resulting in Avengers Disassembled and House of M, before the reveal that she'd sort of resurrected them as the technically unrelated but nevertheless identically Billy Kaplan a.k.a. Wiccan and Tommy Shepherd a.k.a. Speed.
• The Boys: Billy's wife dies when her superpowered fetus (she'd been raped by a super) explodes out of her uterus, floating in the air and firing Eye Beams. He kills it with a table lamp.
• The Invisible Woman of the Fantastic Four had already had a difficult pregnancy with her first child, Franklin. Susan's second child was conceived in the Negative Zone, and resulted in a stillbirth. Then it transpired that Franklin had shunted the stillborn child, alive, off into an alternate future where she was raised by another Sue Storm and her second husband, a heroic Doctor Doom, before coming back thanks to yet another of the FF's trans-dimensional hijinks and eventually sacrificing herself to save the universe. In the restructuring of reality that followed, thanks to Franklin she wound up regressed to a fetus in her mother's womb. Yes, Franklin technically knocked up his mother with his Not Quite Dead sister. The following panel, with Franklin's very-pleased-with-himself expression and his suddenly heavily pregnant mother's baffled one does not help matters. Try not to think too hard about it.
• Played with in the Daredevil story, "Guardian Devil", where a girl comes to Matt Murdock, believing her daughter to be a case of immaculate conception and the kid is the Messiah, with alternate hints that she might be the Antichrist. In reality, the baby is neither; Mysterio kidnapped the mother, then drugged and artificially inseminated her as part of his plan against Daredevil.
• In Doom Patrol, Casey Brinke accidentally gets Terry None pregnant. Because this is the famously weird Doom Patrol, both of them are a) female and b) not quite real. Casey's a comic-book character (as in, she's a comic book character even within the story) and Terry is a Nobody (as in, she's the daughter of Mr. Nobody). Also, the baby (which is a nothing and a nobody) is born by the end of the day, and ends up being turned into a sort of clone of Superman called Milkman Man. Yeah.
• Inverted with Superman and Lois Lane — it was an ongoing plot point that they could not conceive a child because of their Interspecies Romance. However, when Superman was Brought Down to Normal during Convergence, Lois did get pregnant, and everything through the birth was entirely normal. (Well, she was kidnapped by an alternate version of her husband and the baby was delivered by Flashpoint Batman, but the pregnancy itself was normal.)
• The Ultraverse: In Mantra #19, the separated and restored Lukaz and Eden make love and conceive a child. A fact they discovered when they awake the next morning with Eden sporting a full-term belly. They figure it's because of Eden's still largely unknown magical powers, but we immediately find out Necromantra had possessed the child and used it to restore herself to life.

Fairy Tales

• Some tale types of the international Aarne-Thompson-Uther Index deal with the birth of the tale protagonist (hero or heroine) by their mother through ingesting a fruit, a flower, or drinking from tears. Oftentimes, the protagonist's mother is a Truly Single Parent, and there is not mention of a male parent, or there is mention that she is an old widow.
• In tale type ATU 675, "The Lazy Boy", of the international Aarne-Thompson-Uther Index, a poor and lazy fellow helps a fish or a fairy and gains magical powers to make his wishes come true, that is, whatever he commands, it will happen. On his way through the city, the princess sees him and mocks him or laughs at him. In retaliation, the titular Lazy Boy utters a magical command so that the princess becomes pregnant, and it happens thus. After the child's birth, the king assembles every man in the kingdom, for the child to give an apple to the man they recognize as their father (hint: it's the Lazy Boy).

Fan Works

• A Crown of Stars: Although Shinji and Asuka conceived a child in the usual fashion, due the circumstances surrounding the event (they conceiving their baby on Their First Time while they were staying in a Magic Land and under the favour of its divine rulers) the child would be special. Unlike other examples of this trope, the female character is not diminished or turned into a mere superpowered-baby-making machine because Asuka's pregnancy is a very secondary subplot starts late in the story, and the plot and character development does not revolve around it.
  Asuka: “How far along am I? Can you tell?"
  Ching: "From the size of the embryo, about seven weeks. And there's certain signs... Lord and Lady, I wish we had a cleric who could confirm this for me! There's certain signs that... [...] The night of the Ball. Oh my..."
  Asuka: "What? What's that 'oh my' for?"
  Ching: "Nothing bad, don't worry. But if my guess is right and you two did this the night of the Ball, well... a child conceived on Avalon, its parents personally blessed by the Lord and Lady, and on your first time together? That child is going to be showered in fortune and blessings, favored by the gods, filled with special power and grace."
• Baby Boom (Shawna Canon): This actually happens to almost EVERY woman, even TEENAGERS, in Paris when a woman is akumatized after finding out her daughter doesn't want to have kids. She turns into the Fairy Grandmother, who brainwashes people to have sex and increases their fertility. Unlike other akuma effects, there is no Reset Button, even with the Miracle Cure, and now Marinette is pregnant, and so are most of her girl friends, her mother and teacher, and countless other women in Paris.
• Blessed (a Miraculous Ladybug fanfic): Minor case, but it happens when Sabine Cheng and her husband Tom Dupain are having fraternal twins, a boy (Nathaniel) and a girl (Marinette), and are very surprised when their son (who's soon confirmed as Tom's via a blood test) comes out with red hair. Years later, Sabine — who used to be Tikki's partner as the heroine Lady Luck — discovers that the night she retired from heroism due to her pregnancy, when Tikki gave her a kiss on the belly and wished her luck, she unwittingly blessed both children. Nathaniel's hair is thus the color of Tikki's body, and Marinette's is the color of Tikki's spots.
• In Empath: The Luckiest Smurf, Empath and his daughter Psycheliana are both conceived by natural means (that is, in that universe, a male Smurf and a female Smurf having intercourse, not by Delivery Stork), but because both children were telepaths whose powers were active even in the womb, it resulted in painless deliveries by their mothers.
• In Hero: The Guardian Smurf, Hero's wives in two separate marriages, Wonder and Smurfette, were given fertility blessings by Mother Nature that resulted in them bearing two of Hero's daughters, Saviour and Miracle, since the Smurfs themselves, although capable of sexual intercourse, were unable to have children other than through that and the usual mainstream canon's Delivery Stork method.
• In The First Saniwa, it is implied that this is the origin of Seimei's Enemy Within. Before his mother Kuzunoha married his father Yasuna, she was struck with a minor magic wound that had corrupting properties. The magic festered when she was pregnant, and though it was blocked with divine intervention, the magic is impossible to dispel, making it spread to Seimei when he was in her womb.
• In the Fairy Tail fanfiction Second Son, through a spell Lucy becomes nine months pregnant over the course of one night. Needless to say, she is rather freaked out by it. The purpose of the pregnancy is for a wizard to drain her of her life force and magic energy by using the unborn child as a funnel. The team tries to have the spell undone by hunting the wizard down. The constant fighting and running around causes enough stress that Lucy's water eventually breaks and she gives birth to the child. Which in turn screws the wizards plans over. However, the child is formless and will eventually die. Having gone through the stress of pregnancy and childbirth in a short time, Lucy, who beforehand didn't want a child, wants to keep the child and save them, so they continue their hunt. Eventually they are able to confront the wizard and defeat him. He gives them the means to save the child through which a mixture of Lucy and, accidentally, Natsu's blood is used. The now baby girl is theirs.
• Played for Laughs in Aki-chan's Life. When performing a DNA test on Aki to see if Asuka and Shinji's claims about her being their Kid from the Future is true, Ritsuko jokingly states that they're be checking to see if Asuka managed to become a virgin mother (Aki was actually conceived the old fashioned way, if by accident). Of course, Asuka and Shinji had already had sex the night before the final battle, which leads to the following exchange:
  Asuka: (angrily) You idiot! Look at what chance you took from me and Aki!
  Shinji: Hey, you were the one who started... besides, such implications would have only meant unnecessary trouble anyway...
• White Sheep (RWBY): An accidental version. After Yang has her arm cut off by Adam, Jaune implants her with a Grimm parasite that will be able to act as a replacement arm and fill Yang in on what happened while she was unconscious. Jaune didn't expect it to decide it was Yang's son, or for Yang to reciprocate. Yang immediately grabs her bike and drives off to strangle Jaune for knocking her up, leaving her with the kid, and then running off with her sister.
  Yang: Damn it, Jaune. You could at least have let me experience the pleasant parts of baby making first.
• Ranma ½ fanfic Cheaper by the Dozen revolves around the idea that Ranma's attempting to cure himself of his Gender Bender curse with Nannichuan water has Gone Horribly Wrong and instead left him mode locked and with an internal testicle. As a result, every ovulation triggers a counterpart release of sperm, resulting in Ranma impregnating herself. By the time Ryoga finds her twenty years later, she's given birth to 24 daughters, all clones of her female self, and is pregnant with a 25th child in the form of a Mousse-fathered son.
• In the House/Once Upon a Time fanfic Definitely Not Lupus, Emma is revealed to be pregnant with Regina's baby. This is explained as their true love creating it and everyone is shocked that this could happen.
• Harry Potter and the Boiling Isles: As it turns out, in this timeline James was hit with a dark spell by Death Eater Dolohov, rendering him sterile. After Eda threw Lilith into the human world for the night, and she intervened in a fight between James and some Death Eaters, including Dolohov, they got to talking and she told him of a spell that allows people who can't normally conceive to have children. While demonstrating it to him, Lilith inadvertently fulfilled the three conditions and became pregnant with Harry, not realizing it until some time afterward.
• J-WITCH Series: As shown in Nerissa's Start of Darkness chapter, Shendu had Nerissa chip off a piece of his statue form and bring it to life with her Quintessence, then ingest it. This caused their life forces to merge, resulting in her giving birth to Drago in a matter of hours.

Film — Animated

• Tangled: The pregnant Queen Arianna becomes deathly ill, so the army seeks out a mystical flower that could heal her. When she ingests it, she is cured, and her daughter, Rapunzel, is born with blonde hair that has healing powers.

Film — Live-Action

• In the Alien franchise, the Xenomorphs are a form of this. The embryos gestate inside a human host (though the third film suggests any animal will do) and forces its way out once it's big enough. The alien in the first film is even referred to as "Kane's son" at one point.
• Avatar: The Way of Water: Grace's Avatar somehow became pregnant despite being brain-dead and gave birth to Kiri. Nobody knows whose Kiri's father is (or if she even has one) and Kiri happens to have the most spiritual connection to Eywa out of any Na'vi, often spending most of her time embracing the wildlife around her.
• Aurora in Babylon A.D. is pregnant while never having been with a man. It turns out her father used gene therapy to "enhance" Aurora to get pregnant at a certain time in order for the Noelites to become a "bona fide religion" by having a virgin birth. Aurora ends up dying immediately after giving birth to twins (black and white), as she was programmed to do, and the protagonist ends up adopting and raising them.
• Blade (1998): Blade's mother was bitten by a vampire not long before he's born. The result: He's a Dhampyr.
• Faust: Love of the Damned: At the end Jade makes a deal with M for "the soul of her unborn child" in exchange for him releasing his contract on her love interest Jaspers' soul. Then she points out that it's a meaningless concession anyway since she can't bear children as a result of M's (using her father's body) previous rape of her in her youth. He just retorts that he works miracles.
• God Told Me To: Pete Nicholas and Bernard Phillips are both Half-Human Hybrids conceived during an Alien Abduction and born to virgins. Although we never learn how Bernard's mother feels about it, Pete's was badly traumatized by the abduction, the pregnancy, and Slut-Shaming from people who didn't believe her story, to the point where she considered suicide.
• Holidays: Liz gets inexplicably pregnant after a normal one night stand... however, it was with a snake. Apparently this is the work of a pagan cult.
• In Into the Woods, the Baker's Wife goes through an accelerated pregnancy, which is promptly lampshaded by a blunt "Well, that was quick." A more modest interpretation is that reversing the curse simply made it as if the curse was never cast in the first place. This is distinct from the stage version, where nine months pass after the curse lifts and she conceives the child normally.
• The Legend of Hercules: Possibly combined with Express Delivery. Zeus somehow impregnates Alcmene without taking a physical form. She starts to act up in bed even though there is apparently nobody else present.
• Rosemary's Baby involved a young woman getting prescribed mysterious drugs by her doctor during her pregnancy, which she comes to suspect aren't legitimate treatments but something more sinister... but it is too late, and she births an Enfant Terrible (implied as possibly The Antichrist).
• In She Creature, Lily starts to show signs of being pregnant, including morning sickness, cramps, and fainting. When she tells Angus that the mermaid impregnated, he doesn't believe her, partly because she's infertile due to a botched abortion. She eventually gives birth to a baby girl, who is apparently normal except that her eyes sometimes turn red, like the mermaid's.
• Star Wars: In The Phantom Menace, Shmi Skywalker says that Anakin has no father and she doesn't remember having ever slept with a man in the right period to have become pregnant by him, which Qui-Gon assumes to mean that he was conceived by the will of the Force. In Revenge of the Sith, Palpatine's discussion about Darth Plagueis includes a pointed comment that suggests Plagueis' experiments may have been responsible for Shmi's pregnancy. It's revealed in Darth Plagueis (now considered part of the old continuity of Star Wars Legends) that Plagueis was attempting to use a Sith ritual to Rage Against the Heavens and assume control of the Force itself, but it rebelled against him and created Anakin instead to destroy the Sith (which he did technically do in the end, for a time).

Literature

• In Daughters of Arkham, Abigail Thorndike becomes pregnant at/after a creepy carnival and no one can remember what happened that night. The pregnancy lasts a normal nine months but Abigail is granted True Sight, the fetus is protected by mysterious means, and giving birth may have sealed an ancient god.
• Discworld: In Thief of Time, the Anthropomorphic Personification of Time goes through one of these, essentially having the same birth twice, with the end result being one soul going in two children. Nanny Ogg, who was the midwife, was quite surprised, as she told herself (literally).
• In Dune, Lady Jessica drinks and transforms the Water of Life for the Fremen seitch while (unknowingly) pregnant with Alia. Due to that, Alia is born with uncanny psychic powers and the memories (and as seen later, multiple personalities) of all her ancestors — a condition the Bene Geserit foresaw (or probably had seen from prior experience) as coming from such circumstances, to be avoided as "abomination".
• In the Elder Races stories by Thea Harrison, the pregnancy resulting from the marriage of Dragos Cuelebre and Pia Giovanni was complicated to say the least. For starters, Dragos is actually an immortal dragon in human form and Pia is the offspring of a human and a unicorn in human form; Pia herself can turn into a unicorn.. Since the pregnancy was utterly unprecedented, no one knew for sure how long it would go on or what form the offspring would take. Fortunately at nine months, the fetus transformed itself in utero to a human baby and was born normally.
• In the Forgotten Realms Pools of Radiance trilogy, Kern's mother was affected by magic during her pregnancy. Kern gestated at an amazing rate, but didn't age any faster. He's also nearly immune to magic, including healing magic and other helpful magic, which appears to be a result of what happened to his mother.
• In The Kharkanas Trilogy, Sandalath is assaulted by Lord Draconus' power repository that has become corrupted by too much evil in its vicinity and taken on a humanoid form, resulting in several mystical pregnancies with Express Delivery, until something capable of life is produced. While the resulting child is — contrary to expectation — not a Fetus Terrible, Sandalath is quite obviously traumatised for life and comes to see Korlat only as a tool created to protect her first child, Orfantal, from any harm — especially since Korlat is subject to accelerated aging.
• The horror novel The Midwich Cuckoos and its film adaptation Village of the Damned (1960) deals with a town where, after a town's inhabitants fall unconscious under mysterious circumstances, every woman of child-bearing age discovers they are pregnant. The resulting young children are the villains of the tale.
• In The Mortal Instruments: Jocelyn's husband Valentine experimented on her while she was pregnant both times, giving her daughter Clary angel's blood and her son Jonathan Christopher demon's blood, resulting in supernatural powers.
• Owen's parents in A Prayer for Owen Meany claim he was a virgin birth.
• In Quarters, a pregnant bard gradually loses her magical abilities because the kigh of every Quarter except Earth are jealous of the child. This poses increasing problems for Annice as Sing the Four Quarters goes on, and then accidentally saves the day when her labor pains cause her to scream up a huge Earth kigh that wrecks the Cemandian invasion force coming through the Ohrid Pass.
• The Scholomance: In the final book, it's revealed that while El's parents were in the Scholomance, they tried to summon the Golden Stone sutras so they could bring back the Golden Enclaves and left the payment open, implying that all the tragedy in El's life (including the death of her father Arjun) was the price they paid so El could find the sutras as an adult. In truth, El is what the universe actually gave them in order to fulfill their dream—the Powers That Be deliberately made sure she was conceived and gifted with her affinity for powerful spells so she could properly wield the sutras and build the Golden Enclaves in their place.
• The Silerian Trilogy: Elelar goes from conception into full-term pregnancy over just a few days or weeks at most. It's an explicitly supernatural event caused by their goddess, though she still gets pregnant through normal sex.
• A Song of Ice and Fire: Daenerys's pregnancy starts off normal, but after she asks a witch to perform Blood Magic to save her husband, the witch complicates Daenerys's pregnancy, leading her to birth a horrific reptilian baby that may have damaged Daenerys's womb and rendered her incapable of bearing children forever. (Or did it?)
• The Twilight Saga: A character^note Bella ends up impregnated by a vampire^note Edward and giving birth to a Half-Human Hybrid dhampyr that ends up growing supernaturally quickly.

Live-Action TV

• 3rd Rock from the Sun: Vicki is impregnated by the Big Giant Head; the pregnancy lasts only a few hours, but the baby is actually remarkably normal.
• The 4400: In "Pilot", seven weeks after the return of the 4400, Lily learns that she is pregnant. Her husband Brian was away for weeks before her disappearance so he can't be the father and she has not been with anyone else since her return. As such, she and Richard conclude that she must have been impregnated after she was abducted. In "White Light", she discovers that her baby has sickle cell anemia and it is determined that Richard is the father. In "One of Us", it was revealed that the member of the Marked who took control of Matthew Ross and later Tom Baldwin was responsible for creating Isabelle and impregnating Lily.
• In Angel this happens to Cordelia twice and Darla once.
  • In "Expecting", Cordelia has a one-night-stand with a guy who turns out to be a human 'donor' for the sperm of a demon he worships. It ensures the human is extremely lucky with women and that any woman he sleeps with becomes immediately pregnant with the demon's offspring, carrying the offspring to term in only a few days and dying in the process of giving birth. Cordelia is saved just before she gives birth.
  • Cordelia was used by a Power That Was as an incubator for that Power's own birth after that Power had instigated several miracles which were pre-requisite for Its own birth.
  • Vampires can't have children, but Angel and Darla did, after having both been brought back from Hell. The baby was human with certain, unexplained demonic connections. Because her body was dead during the pregnancy, Darla was unable to give birth so had to stake herself to save the baby. The pregnancy and birth was also one of the miracles required by the Power That Was for It to be born as it required this child, Connor, to sire it into being via Cordelia's body.
• In Being Human (UK), Nina discovers the hard way that her birth control doesn't work when she's a werewolf. The pregnancy progresses at about twice the normal rate, but the baby is born human (though it is also the subject of an ancient vampire prophecy).
• Every pregnancy in Charmed (1998) is mystical simply by the fact that the main characters are witches with a tendency to hook up with other supernatural creatures.
  • The first pregnancy was Phoebe, who didn't realize that her husband, Cole, was once again evil, this time because he was possessed by the Source. Cole actually went through extra effort to create the perfect little demon baby by secretly making their wedding a demonic rite and conceiving the baby at a certain time.
  • Piper's older son, Wyatt, is godlike even by magic standards. He was pulling off bizarre tricks even as a fetus, including producing a force field and Healing Factor that made Piper basically invincible. Her second son, Chris, did not get these protections. To his older self's annoyance.
• Doctor Who: Companion Amy's pregnancy during Series 6. The baby was conceived aboard a TARDIS in flight, giving her primitive Time Lord DNA. Amy was held prisoner during her pregnancy so that the Big Bads could steal her baby.
• In Fringe, Fauxlivia is subjected to horrifying medical experiments to artificially accelerate her pregnancy, both because the pregnancy would kill her and because Walternate wants the baby's blood to power a Doomsday Device.
• In the Game of Thrones episode "Garden of Bones", a pregnant priestess gives birth to a shadow demon, conceived by magic, to use it as a magical assassin.
• Guardian: The Lonely and Great God: Ji Eun-tak's mother died in a car accident while carrying her, and was resurrected by Kim Shin. The unborn Eun-tak subsequently became his bride, the only key for him to achieve salvation and enter the afterlife. Since she was not meant to be born, however, Eun-tak also spends her entire life being hunted by reapers, who don't like the idea of a "lost soul" running around.
• Played with on Jane the Virgin. Although the eponymous Jane does become pregnant while still a virgin, it's because her OB/GYN was distracted by personal problems and accidentally gave her an artificial insemination (meant for another patient), instead of the routine Pap smear she came in for, not the result of anything supernatural. However, this doesn't stop a religious group treating her like the next immaculate conception, much to her chagrin.
• Lucifer (2016): Chloe's parents struggled to have a child and only conceived when God sent Amenadiel to bless them. The characters believe for a long time that God "created" Chloe to be both immune to Lucifer's power and to make him mortal in her presence; both Lucifer and Chloe separately struggle to come to terms with this news when they each find out the truth. It's later revealed that Chloe actually doesn't make Lucifer mortal at all; he subconsciously makes himself vulnerable when in her presence, meaning that it's her immunity to his power that's linked to her mystical conception, and nothing else.
• In The Magicians (2016), one character gets raped by the Trickster God Reynard and finds herself pregnant. When she tries to get an abortion, the magic (whether from the baby itself or Reynard) forces the doctor to commit suicide. Eventually she finds someone who can do a magical abortion, and it succeeds, but causes her to lose part of her soul in the process. Julia, Kady and Penny also find the result of one of these pregnancies carried to term, and he's a Congressman with latent Charm Person powers.
• In Once Upon a Time, Cinderella was pregnant when the Dark Curse brought her to Storybrooke, where because of being essentially frozen in time, she was pregnant for 28 years. Delivery was also complicated because she had tried to renege on a deal with Rumplestiltskin.
• Pandora: Jax finds she's pregnant in Season 2 Episode 7 to her surprise, since both she and her partner were using birth control. However, it turns out that she's pregnant with a clone of herself somehow, and the pregnancy continues far quicker than normal, so that she delivers that same day or the next. The next episode revealed that Zazie Nichols had implanted a zygote of a clone of Jax to impregnate her, and that Eve Zhou, Jax's own mother, gave Zazie the required materials to do so.
• In Resurrection, Rachel was pregnant when she killed herself, though she didn't realize it. When she returns, she's still pregnant, and the baby is growing unusual quickly. At one point, all of the other Returned go into a weird trance and stare towards Rachel's apartment in the morning; this leads to the belief that the baby is some kind of Anti-Christ or something, with the finale focused on the Big Bad trying to kill it. Maybe this all would have been explained had the series continued.
• Sabrina the Teenage Witch has an episode where Sabrina works at the Other Realm Rumour Mill — not realising that any rumours she starts there become true in the Mortal Realm. She starts a rumour about Harvey being pregnant, and sure enough...
• The Sandman (2022): In "Playing House", Lyta dreams that she is visited by her late husband, they make love, and she falls pregnant; when she wakes up, she's visibly pregnant in real life. In the following episode, she falls asleep again and dreams of spending months with her husband while only a few hours pass in the waking world, and when she wakes her pregnancy has advanced the same amount as it had in the dream. In the episode after that, she gives birth to a healthy baby boy, who has some special (but as yet unspecified) destiny due to being conceived and carried to term in the Dreaming.
• In a Saturday Night Live Mother's Day sketch, from a season 41 episode hosted by Brie Larson, Leslie Jones' character recalls that after she decided she didn't want to make out with her husband, just to have a baby, she instead got a tacky haircut that all the mothers in town already had, then... "Boom! I was seven months pregnant!"
• Sleepy Hollow: Katrina is magically impregnated by Henry (her son) using a mystical poison. Before Ichabod, Katrina's husband, makes the connection between the poison Henry recently stole and Katrina's condition, he suspects she cheated on him with the Headless Horseman (It Makes Sense in Context).
• Soap:
  • Tim doesn't believe that Corinne's baby is his because she's showing after only a few weeks of pregnancy. She insists that it's Tim's baby, and ends up giving birth after only a month or so. It turns out that the baby is possessed by the devil.
  • Mary is pregnant with Burt's child, but she's not sure it's his — she conceived at around the same time when he had been kidnapped by aliens and replaced by an alien doppelgänger, so it might be half alien.
    Mary: Oh, thank God, it's white!
    [Black nurse gives dirty look]
• In Season 9 of Stargate SG-1, Vala is impregnated by the Ori (god-like aliens) with their version of the Messiah. For a while, Vala just knows that she didn't have sex but she isn't sure how it happened. It isn't until late in the pregnancy that she finds out the child is "the will of the Ori." Specifically, she's going to give birth to The Antichrist as a way for the Ori to cheat the "Non-Interference Policy" the Ancients enforce.
• In the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode "The Child", Deanna Troi is impregnated by glowing space energy and gives birth to a mysterious, rapidly aging child, an alien life form that comes and goes this way.
• Eleven on Stranger Things is heavily implied to be a result of the supernatural pregnancy/experimented on by doctors variant of this trope. She has Psychic Powers as well as Telekinesis.
• In Supergirl (2015), during the Elseworlds (2018) crossover event, Lois is pregnant with Clark's baby. It isn't clear whether this is the trope in action or an inversion as the circumstances of conception are not discussed. The couple is going to stay on Argo (a surviving fragment of Krypton) for the duration of the pregnancy for Lois's safety (also providing a solid explanation for why we won't see Superman for the foreseeable future).
• Supernatural:
  • In "I Believe the Children Are Our Future", a virgin woman is possessed and impregnated by a demon, giving birth to the Antichrist.
  • Kelly Kline has an affair with her boss, The President, not realizing he's possessed by an archangel, Lucifer. Her child is a nephilim, a powerful angel/human hybrid that the angels consider a dangerous abomination.
• Ten Miles of Peach Blossoms: Le Xu touched a Golden Lotus and became pregnant with Ye Hua, who's the spirit of the lotus in a human body.
• In the Torchwood episode "Something Borrowed", Gwen wakes up on her wedding day hugely pregnant with an alien parasite. The team manages to kill it (and its mother) by the end of the episode.
• The Vampire Diaries Universe: Both Hope Mikaelson and Landon Kirby in The Originals and Legacies defy the laws of nature with their existence. Hope, the world's first and only witch-vampire-werewolf hybrid, was born to a werewolf mother and a thousand-years-old vampire-werewolf (and witch gene carrier) hybrid father, Klaus Mikaelson. Landon is the result of his father's, Malivore's, thousand years quest of creating an immortal, flawless and fertile heir to continue the bloodline. Despite Malivore being an artificial creation of mud and thus infertile, he was able to engineer a biological child (Landon) from a human and monster DNA he has absorbed over time.
• One of the freakier episodes of Ultraman Ace has the demon Yapool impregnating a young woman named Yoshiko with his curse, whose unborn child will manifest as the monster Mazarius. Ultraman Ace managed to exorcise said monster preventing it from being born, but at the end of the episode Ace still needs to fight the monster's handler, Mazaron Man.
• In The Umbrella Academy (2019), the 43 are the result of multiple random women simultaneously becoming pregnant and minutes later giving birth to superpowered kids.
• Happens on Xena: Warrior Princess when Xena finds out she's pregnant with Eve, the reincarnation of her former archenemy Callisto, whose soul Xena had saved from Hell. It starts when she, Gabrielle, and some friends are at a tavern and Xena orders an extremely bizarre food combination. She later sees a doctor who informs her that she's pregnant, which shocks and confuses her since she hadn't been intimate with a man in a very long time.
• A classic example occurs early in the run of The X-Files, as Scully finds herself impregnated by aliens. Towards the end of the series, she has another Mystical Pregnancy.
  Mulder: You want to know who the father is, that's Scully's business. But if you're asking me how a woman who was diagnosed as barren and unable to conceive is about to give birth in a couple days, that's an answer I can't honestly give.

Mythology and Religion

This is a very, very, very old and common trope in religion. It's probably easier to name religions that don't have mystical pregnancies than ones that do.

• Aztec Mythology:
  • Huitzilopochtli was conceived when his mother Coatlicue tucked a bundle of feathers into her cleavage. When her other 400 children beheaded her for this illegitimate pregnancy, Huitzilopochtli sprang fully-formed from her womb and killed them all in punishment.
  • Quetzalcoatl has some myths claiming he was an immaculate conception to a virgin named Chimalman; one where he was conceived after she was visited in a dream by the god Ometeotl, one where Chimalman became pregnant by swallowing an emerald, and one where she became pregnant with him after being accidentally shot in the womb with an arrow cast by the god Mixcoatl.
• From The Bible:
  • Jesus' mother Mary was an unwed virgin. She became pregnant directly by the power of God, without the need for sex.
    "How will this be," Mary asked the angel, "since I am a virgin?"
    The angel answered, "The Holy Spirit will come on you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you. So the holy one to be born will be called the Son of God."

    — Luke 1:34-35
  • Infertile women getting pregnant is a running theme in the Old Testament: Sarah was actually post-menopausal and, according to Jewish tradition, born without a womb, but got pregnant by a miracle. Other examples include Rebecca, Rachel and Hannah/Chana; the New Testament adds Elizabeth and, according to Catholic tradition, Mary's own mother. (All these cases involved actual fathers, though.) On a related note, Catholics also believe Mary herself was the Immaculate Conception, meaning God protected her from original sin from the moment she was conceived in her own mother's womb.
• In Buddhism, the story of the Vipassi Buddha states he was conceived in a dream in which his mother, Maya, was carried to the Himalyana Mountains by four archangels, whose queens bathed and dressed her before a white elephant entered her womb through the right side of her body. This dream was interpreted to mean that her child would either be a great sage or a great warrior. (His dad was a warrior-king, so he wanted the latter option, but obviously it didn't work out.)
• Where do we begin with Classical Mythology? Zeus alone impregnated women in the forms of a bull, a swan, and a shower of golden light.
• In Egyptian Mythology, Horus was conceived by Isis hovering in the air over Osiris and beating her wings. At the time, Osiris was A: dead, and B: neutered, his penis being the one piece of his body Isis couldn't recover due to its being eaten by a fish.
• In Hindu Mythology, various avatars incarnate themselves through spontaneously impregnating women, including Krishna, Karna and Rama.
  • In The Ramayana, the god Vishnu turns himself into celestial porridge (no, seriously) that King Dasaratha is supposed to feed to his wives. All three of them subsequently give birth to sons that are endowed to different degrees with Vishnu's essence.
  • In the Mahabharata, Kunti receives a mantra that she can use to make one of the gods impregnate her. She is also told that she can use it up to five times without compromising her purity. She uses it, and produces the Pandavas. Out of curiosity, she uses it one more time than she's supposed to and gives birth to Karna, who is sent away for being illegitimate.
• In The Kalevala, Väinämöinen was conceived by his sky-goddess mother as a result of a violent storm whilst she was floating in the endless sea. He then was carried in her womb for centuries, eventually being born as a fully-grown man with long flowing hair and a Wizard Beard, both completely snow-white.
• The Qur'an also acknowledges `Īsā (Jesus' name in Islam) from Maryam (Mary) as a miraculous virgin birth (to an infant that could give sermons and prophecy from his crib), but makes it clear that God is the creator of this child/prophet not the father as equating anything to God is Islam is the gravest sin as God was not begotten and does not beget and is above His creation. (It's kinda complicated, but basically, in the Muslim conception, Mary alone is the actual biological parent of Jesus—instead of being the Son of God by Mary, the Muslim Jesus has a mother but has no father at all. Mary became pregnant with a son because God willed it.)

Pinball

• Embryon requires the player to incubate multicolored alien females from organic pods.

Tabletop Games

• The Celestial Incarna Mother Luna in Exalted always appears heavily pregnant when she takes human form — whether or not that form is female.
• The Nativity in Mage: The Awakening happens when a woman gets exposed to the power of the Abyss outside the universe in exactly the wrong way, and spontaneously conceives a child infected with Abyssal power. While the child is physically and mentally normal, it's a Doom Magnet with a damaged soul, so raising it tends to be a trial for mother and child alike.
• While most sorcerer bloodlines in Pathfinder are inherited (either in the traditional way, a Lamarckian way or in some cases a mystical Other (like your family having a destiny attached to them), some have something happening at conception or pregnancy as suggested possibilities for how you got the bloodline, and in one case (the Nanite bloodline) it's the sole suggestion.
• Warhammer 40,000: In early editions of the game, the Emperor of Mankind was actually born when a group of prehistoric psyker-shamans deliberately committed ritual suicide in order to merge their souls together to create a super-psyker, which would be born to an unsuspecting human host-mother and grow up to become an immortal guardian for humanity. Things went horribly wrong. This lore was later retconned out.
• This is normal in the Realm of Ghyran in Warhammer: Age of Sigmar. Because Ghyran is "built" out of the Jade Wind, the elemental magic of life, magical forms of reproduction are ubiquitous, to the point that immaculate conceptions, Homosexual Reproduction, and male pregnancy are all downright vanilla. The realm is prone to "life-quakes", which are random upheavals of Jade magic that cause spontaneous immaculate conceptions, whilst those who get too close to the impenetrable forest of jade crystals that marks Ghyran's "Realms End", the place where it gives way to the Realm of Chaos, risk being trapped in a perpetual cycle of immaculate conception, pregnancy and birth, amongst other fates.

Video Games

• Black & White 2: A man in one Sidequest claims that his daughter was supernaturally impregnated by their town's Patron God. This is news to you, the god in question. You can either let the lie stand or investigate the truth of the pregnancy, which turns out to involve decidedly non-mystical trysts with a neighbour.
• Poor, poor Arianna of Bloodborne. After killing Micolash, you'll return to Oedon Chapel to find her missing and a trail of blood leading down a ladder into the Tomb. Follow the trail and you'll find her, completely broken, having given birth to an Eldritch Abomination. Then you're faced with a Sadistic Choice of the highest order: either kill the child, which will kill her as well, or let her live in tortured insanity with the alien baby she was forced to give birth to. Making things more painful is that there's a viable in-game reason to kill her (the child drops a Third Umbilical Cord), but the child is not hostile at all. Fake Iosefka also seems to have been impregnated in much the same way, though at least in her case she was willing.
• In The Book of Unwritten Tales 2, Ivo finds herself pregnant, with no clue as to how it happened. As it turns out, her pregnancy is due to an all-powerful wish-granting artifact she wore for some time. Residues of its magic stayed with her, and when her boyfriend started to dream of building a family with her, the magic made it come true.
• Lunatic characters attracted to women in Crusader Kings II have a random event where they attempt to seduce a rosebush. This can actually produce a child. Its counterpart for those attracted to men is being seduced by a centaur. This can also result in a pregnancy.
  • With the Sons of Abraham DLC, there is a very rare event chain where one of your children turns out to be the Spawn of Satan, although you only find out a few years after the child is born.
  • With the Monks and Mystics DLC, female members of Satanic cults (including player characters) can be impregnated with the Spawn of Satan via decision. Upon induction into the Satanic cult, Spawns of Satan (including the ones that result from the previously mentioned event chain) automatically become the new leader of the cult, regardless of age, gender, or anything else.
• The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim: Each dragon, including the Dragonborn, is said to be a child of Akatosh. As the Dragonborn are the result of Mystical Pregnancy via virgin births, it's likely they have mortal fathers, as well.
• Dr. Hojo, the Mad Scientist from Final Fantasy VII, tampered with his pregnant wife and unborn son by injecting cells from an Eldritch Abomination into her body. The result was the most powerful Super-Soldier in the setting, who eventually defected to the side of said abomination and became the Big Bad of the game.
• The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask: This is the significance of Lulu's eggs. Once hatched, they conveniently teach the song that restores their mother's voice and opens the way to Great Bay Temple.
• Can happen in The Sims 2 if the player makes use of the Tombstone of Life and Death. This enables Sims to produce babies with same-sex partners, Sims that don't live in their household but are visiting or even just passing by, etc. It also enables Sim women to become alien pregnant. (Men can become pregnant by aliens if they spend too much time looking at the telescope. Women can be abducted by aliens, but never become pregnant as a result.) Olive Specter is the mother of Nervous Subject. The father? The Grim Reaper. Apparently Olive had an affair with Grim when he kept coming for her husbands. This isn't actually possible in game bar the Tombstone of Life and Death.
• Super Robot Wars: Ryusei Date gained Psychic Powers as a result of experiments that were performed on his mother when she was pregnant with him.
• In Umineko: When They Cry, nine-year-old Maria Ushiromiya reveals that she believes this is how she was born. Her mother Rosa would angrily deny that Maria had a father whenever Maria tried to ask her about him, and later on a priest came to Maria's school and read to them about Jesus' immaculate conception. By her own logic, this made Maria come to the conclusion that she was a "child of God" who came into this world without an earthly father like Jesus did.
• The backstory of Warcraft has a human mage named Aegwynn getting pregnant with Medivh at the age of approximately 1,000, long after menopause would have made conception impossible in an ordinary human. And Sargeras corrupted Medivh in the womb, making both the conception and the gestation supernatural.

Web Comics

• Olympic Dames provides a rare example of the mother(s) benefitting from a Mystical Pregnancy, as five teenagers develop magical powers after becoming pregnant. It's a dubious benefit as the girls are forced to defend themselves from monsters which come after them. Also, the pregnancies were non-consensual, though the comic doesn't portray the girls as traumatized and even their anger is kept in the background.
• In Professor Amazing and the Incredible Golden Fox, Isla Grace's three pregnancies only lasted seven months each due to her transformations into a fox. She was also pregnant when she first started transforming and had little to no control over it.
• Unsounded: Everyone conceived within Alderode's borders is sorted into its Fantastic Caste System by its distorted Background Magic Field. Caste determines physical appearance, magical potential, lifespan, and possibly personality, so most non-Aldishmen find the prospect horrific.

Western Animation

• Kipo and the Age of Wonderbeasts: Due to the genetic modifications applied to unborn eggs, Song's pregnancy with Kipo starts out normal before she suffers from Power Incontinence, her arm spontaneously growing and receding fur and her Super-Strength breaking things by accident. Even after she gives birth, these characteristics do not go away, Song spending the next 13 years as the mega-monkey before Kipo cures her.
• Miraculous Ladybug: It's revealed that both Emilie and Amelie became pregnant with Adrien and Felix through the Peacock Miraculous.
• Samurai Jack: Aku was impressed enough by his cult's worship of him to gave them a bit of his essence, which the High Priestess then drank and became pregnant with septuplets. Now, what makes this especially outstanding is that normally, anyone who drinks Aku turns into an Aku clone.
• Played for Laughs in the South Park episode "Woodland Critter Christmas." Stan meets a bunch of cute forest creatures, one of whom, Porcupiney the porcupine, turns out to be miraculously pregnant with "the son of our lord." Apparently this happens every year, though the pregnant Critter is usually eaten by a mountain lion who wants to prevent the birth. The Critters are Satanists, the child is the Antichrist, and the mountain lion is Good All Along.
• Steven Universe: Steven is a Half-Human Hybrid and his mother was the non-human parent, a Gem named Rose Quartz. In a video recorded before Steven's "birth", Rose's prominent round belly suggests she was pregnant in a distinctly human way. The other Gems regard this as miraculous, since it really shouldn't be possible: Gems have No Biological Sex and their bodies are made of Hard Light rather than flesh-and-blood. They don't understand how Steven was conceived, they only know that Rose Quartz could do things no other Gem could. Of course, Rose Quartz being Pink Diamond probably had something to do with it.

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