Woman uses butcher's knife for own caesarian

[dArKeR]

By Lisa Adams

Rio Talea - Alone in her one-room cabin high in the mountains of southern Mexico, Ines Ramirez Perez felt the pounding pains of a child insistent on entering the world.

Three years earlier, she had given birth to a dead baby girl. As her labour intensified, so did her concern for this unborn child.

The sun had set hours ago. The nearest clinic was 80km away over rough terrain, and her husband, her only assistant during a half-dozen previous births, was drinking at a cantina. She had no telephone.

So at midnight, after 12 hours of constant pain, the petite, 40-year-old mother of six sat down on a low wooden bench. She took several gulps from a bottle of rubbing alcohol, grabbed the 15cm knife that she used for butchering animals and pointed it at her belly.

http://iol.co.za/index.php?click_id=3&art_id=vn20040601135122802C213192&set_id=1

I'm not into gory stories but this one has been itching inside me and just waiting to be ripped out of my mouth. I think it's the biggest conspiracy since Bush Couped the WH. How did us humans survive 160,000 years without hospitals and doctors to deliver our babies? What do we need them for? Why can't families deliver their own babies and cut out the middle man and his fees?

[BlueEyedSon]

1. How does Bush figure into this drama set in southern Mexico?

Lots of women die during childbirth, or have stillborn children. Now and historically.....

[MikeG]

8. Finally. A woman not using a butcher knife on a guy's thingie.

[Gman]

13. This is actually part of the Medicare bill

and will incent mothers on Medicaid to do the same through a one time $250 contribution to their medical savings accouts. Of course, the $250 is taxable.

[struggle4progress]

39. Presumably, assisted suicide is another key ingredient in the bill.

[CharlesGroce]

2. you know what?

35% of deliveries are now C-Section deliveries, the majority of which are lower class, and that's not because they are any less healthy, it's because doctors (and the financial institutions they work for) know that the potential bill is high and less likely to be contended by the lesser educated lower class.

Think about that: 35% get C-Sections. Indeed how did we ever survive without so many doctors and so much medicine: the answer is we did survive, just fine.

[liberalhistorian]

9. Indeed, many doctors

routinely do C-sections on poorer women simply because it's more convenient for them, they can make more money, and the women rarely raise any kind of fuss. There is absolutely NO REASON for such a high rate of C-sections, no other industrialized country has anywhere near such a rate.

The truth is that we really don't need hospitals for the majority of births, but we've been made to feel like it's criminal if we don't deliver our babies in a hospital. Only 10% of births require any kind of special or emergency care and/or treatment; many, many women are realizing this and choosing to have a more natural birth. The medical profession is screaming bloody murder, but that's their problem, frankly. They've turned pregnancy into a "disease" that needs to be "cured", and women shouldn't stand for it anymore.

[frankieT]

19. interesting post -eom-

[THUNDER HANDS]

24. actually

More and more women are requesting elective c-sections. The doctors don't like it and are trying to reduce the numbers. But if that's what a woman wants, the doctor is going to okay it.

[GreenArrow]

28. actually

Doctors do like it, because they can schedule it, thus making the birth take place at their convienience. The doctor is the star of the show, you know.

[DemBones DemBones]

36. Actually, it's a little of both.

I've known women in the past couple of years who scheduled their deliveries to fit into their other plans. I thought they were nuts but I didn't tell them that.

Doctors who do it are nuts, too, and I would tell them so if I had the opportunity.

[MisterP]

42. well, we didn't really survive just FINE...

[yankeeinlouisiana]

3. That is one strong woman!!

"Ramirez, who had her tubes tied to prevent additional pregnancies, does not recommend her desperate, painful action to other women."

You can say that again! My first child was a c-section and I'm glad a doctor did it!!

[Kagemusha]

4. That happened with the Acadians of eastern Canada.

And you know how they managed without doctors?

Because the ones who would have needed doctors DIED.

The survivors passed on their doctorless delivery friendly genes onto their offspring. Over several generations they developed highly frontier resistant mothers who had a very low childbirth death rate because it had been bred out of them.

Fearing they would outbreed English immigrants by considerable margins, British troops, during the time of the French & Indian Wars, expelled Acadians in 1755. Some returned to France; some crawled back to what would become Canada; many became the "Cajuns". Though not blood related to the expelled, I grew up in Eastern Canada in their communities and am of 92% French ancestry so I know the story well.

Bottom line: You don't, if you're willing to accept Africa-level death rates from do-it-yourself childbirth until after a few generations, you thin out the complication-prone female population.

Do you REALLY want to do that?

[lolly]

5. You're kidding, no?

I'm all for giving women more power over the birthing process, but do-it-yourself C-Sections are hardly an answer to the over-medicalization of childbirth!

As for "what did we do before doctors," many things were better--no obtrusive procedures, embarrassing exams, etc.--but approximately 10% of women die in childbirth in areas with NO medical help.

I had a c-section 2 days before this brave woman did, and I was very happy to have it in a hospital with an epidural!

[liberalhistorian]

12. Yes, I can't imagine having had my C-section

anywhere other than a hospital, and I don't even want to think about what this woman went through!

[Tansy_Gold]

6. Afghanistan is a good example of how childbirth "used" to

kill about one in five women.

Yeah, I think we really really really want to go back to those good ol' days.

/sarcasm off/

Midwives and home births and woman-centered birthing techniques are nice, but they're better when coupled with a bit of sanity.

[DBoon]

16. Convents made a lot of sense

Chastity wasn't a virtue, it was a way to survive childbirth. A woman taking vows was assuring she did not die a painful death in labor.

[jdj]

31. Sanity?

Home births were common until the last 60 or 70 years.

Human species have dominated the earth for quite a bit longer than that, so midwives must have been doing something right, for, say, about 40 centuries.

What is important is medical knowlege of childbirth, which men did not have in any capacity when they wrested control of medicine from women.

It spits in the faces of midwives that have delivered children for tens of thousands of years (without them literally NONE OF US would be here) to imply that giving children a more humane and less violent birth is somehow 'less than sane'. These posts have really thrown the baby out with the bathwater, so to speak. One doesn't have to totally discount the immeasurable service to humanity that midwives have given since the dawn of human history to acknowledge the benefits that modern medicine can bring to childbirth. The truth is that the best birth is a mix of the two, and a mix is what you will get nowadays in most hospitals if that is the route that you choose. At least women are conscious when giving birth nowadays; my mother was out cold with me and my siblings, doesn't remember a thing about any of our births.

Afghanistan is a TERRIBLE example, as any islamic fundamentalist or otherwise woman-hating society would be. There is nothing on earth, except a few SA or polynesian tribes, that even remotely resemble the fairly advanced so-called "fertility cults" where women were held in at least equal esteem with men, and so not hindered from applying and accumulating knowledge about their own body functions and using observation and deduction to improve the rates of survival of the children they and their mothers, sisters, and daughters bore. This was of the utmost importance to them, much more than it is to today's humans; the whole tribe or clan would have been centered on fertility, that of the women and the crops they raised. First and foremost would have been the freedom to choose their own mate, which just about all species are geared biologically to do. How many paternalistic societies allow women this? If women don't have even this choice then you can hang it up for the culture in regards to what unbridled healing and midwifery had the potential to do in that culture.

[UpInArms]

7. note to the reading public:

Do not try this at home!

[democracyindanger]

11. Especially the drinking rubbing alcohol part

This story underlines the need for professional medical care, not the dismissal of it. Poor woman.

[Lou_C]

10. Stabbing yourself in the gut and removing a baby well

That has to be very painful don't you think?

[arikara]

14. My cousin delivered his own baby

They live way out in the country, it was a stormy icy night. They had a birth kit and figured it was safer to stay home when she went into labour. It was their 4th and she never had problems. He said that it was the most incredible experience.

I know that is nowhere near the same thing as what that poor woman in the story went through but it still blows me away.

[TexasMexican]

15. Fucking Hardcore

damn, glad it worked out alright.

[DemBones DemBones]

17. Obstetrical care saves women from horrible injuries and death.

Sure, healthy women often can deliver healthy infants without medical help. But many healthy women need medical intervention to deliver safely and when it's not available, women suffer horribly. Read up on what happens to women in Africa and other regions where medical care is not readily available:  


The Hidden Epidemic

Maternal Morbidity and Mortality

"A tremendous disparity exists between risks associated with pregnancy and labor faced by women in the developing world compared to women from wealthier nations. Over the course of a lifetime, 1 in 30,0000 Scandinavian women will die in pregnancy or labor. For a woman from Africa, the risk is 1 in 12. 

To think of it from another perspective, the annual number of maternal deaths estimated in the West African nation of Nigeria roughly equals the number of American men that died in the Korean Conflict of the 1950's.  The developed world seems to be unaware of the carnage, largely because women in the developing world have no voice in the international community.


But, for every woman that dies in labor in the developing world, many more find their lives destroyed by terrible injuries.   For most women, the problem is untreated obstructed labor.   Access to modern obstetrical care is only a dream for much of the world, and availability of a timely cesarean section is an impossibility.  The grinding pressure of the fetal head throughout days of obstructed labor causes interruption of blood-flow to pelvic organs, and a whole spectrum of injuries ensue.  Just a partial list of resulting problems would include:

Vesicovaginal Fistula (VVF):  The tissue lying between the bladder and vagina dies from lack of blood supply, and a large opening results.  This renders the patient totally and permanently incontinent of urine.

Rectovaginal Fistula (RVF):  The same process results in a hole between the rectum and vagina, and total fecal incontinence ensues.

Amenorrhea:   For nearly two thirds of VVF victims, menstrual cycles never resume, and the pregnancy resulting in this obstetrical catastrophe is the woman's first and last.

Vaginal Destruction:   Loss of blood flow to the pelvis results, for some women, in the total loss of vaginal tissue, and sexual activity becomes impossible.

Foot-drop:   About 1 in 5 VVF victims suffer damage to nerves supplying muscles in the lower leg, resulting in foot-drop.  This severely limits the woman's mobility and ability to perform the tasks associated with daily  living.
 

In many developing-world cultural contexts, the role of the woman is to provide sexual satisfaction for her husband, to produce children, and to do much of the hard labor associated with life in agricultural societies.  This spectrum of injuries is cruelly effective in destroying the woman's ability to perform any of these roles, and social melt-down results.   These women become social outcasts, isolated from family,  friends, village society, and religious life  by a scenario in which they had no active role. "

http://www.wfmic.org/hidden_epidemic.htm


from another source:

"Vesico Vaginal Fistula (VVF). . . is generally caused by prolonged, obstructed labour which, in some cases, can last up to 10 days. During labour, the infant's skull presses against the soft tissues of the mother's pelvis, interrupting the blood supply.

If the condition lasts for more than three hours, the tissues die, leaving an opening between the bladder and the vagina. As a result, the mother leaks urine continuously. The prolonged labour can also create a hole between the bladder and the rectum – a recto vaginal fistula - causing faeces to leak into the woman's vagina. In 95% of the cases, the infant dies inside the mother.

. . .Fistulas occur in 2 to 5 out of every 1000 deliveries and were quite common in Europe and North America until the middle of the 20th century."

(Fistulas were the reason for many women spending their days on a "fainting couch" in the "good old days." Apparently, there was less leakage of urine and/or feces as long as they stayed in a reclining position so they were carried around rather than walking. Obviously, only the well-off women got this treatment , God only knows what happened to the poor ones because they certainly don't fare well today in the countries where this is still a major problem.)


and yet another source:

"An obstetric fistula is a hole that develops between a woman's vagina and her bladder or rectum, or both, usually as a result of trauma during childbirth. If a woman's baby will not fit through her birth canal because her pelvis is too small or the baby is too big or badly positioned, the labor is said to be obstructed.

The baby's head becomes wedged in the mother's pelvis, cutting off the blood supply to the soft tissues of her bladder, rectum and vagina.Where there is inadequate obstetric care, a woman may be in obstructed labor for three or four days without relief. The baby usually dies. If the mother survives, her injured pelvic tissue soon rots away, creating a fistula.

Fistulas may also result from ritual genital cutting, unsafe abortion attempts, pelvic fractures or other injury.

Consequences of obstetric fistulas:

*

Women with bladder (vesico-vaginal) fistulas have no control over their urine, and those with rectal (recto-vaginal) fistulas have no control over their bowel movements.
*

The women suffer from discomfort and humiliation of constant wetness that leaves them with genital ulcerations, frequent infections and a terrible odor.
*

Rupture or scarring of their uteruses may have left them infertile.
*

Affected women are often blamed for their condition, which may be confused with venereal disease. They are shamed, ostracized, divorced, abandoned, isolated and left without support. Many women are forced to become beggars.
*

Women who formerly prepared or sold food for a living usually can no longer do so, as they and their possessions are regarded as unclean. They may be excluded from religious practices and barred from public transportation.
*

As most of these women's babies died from the obstructed labor, and many suffer infertility afterward, they may be further isolated in societies where childlessness is unacceptable and social support systems require kinship groups."



Read the story of Hawa Musa, a Nigerian victim of injuries from childbirth to get a better picture of what the numbers and clinical descriptions mean for a woman's life. (More numbers: It's estimated that there are at least 200, 000 Nigerian women living with these injuries.)

http://www.wfmic.org/profile2.htm

[jdj]

32. Lack of medical care is only a small part of the problem

here. How many of these women had their genitals hacked off with broken glass or rusty razors at age 5 or 6 and the remains of their labia sewn together with thorns? When they have to give birth, are the implements used to rip open the small opening left from their FGM even clean? After they give birth, they are sewn back up, and I am sure infection and disease spread from this too. These statistics are a sickening example of what life is like for women in cultures that hate women, and although these statistics concern childbirth I am sure that every other part or phase of female life in such a culture has it's own specific horror story. I would wonder what the stats for infant mortality are for non-muslim primitive African tribes; although it would have to be discretionary because some kill or abandon infants due to superstititon and tribal beliefs.

The distinguishing feature here seems to be choice, that a woman have options about her birth just as she has access to abortion. Some of the "bad old days" concern allopathic medicine as well; as much information as possible from as many sources of experience is what is most beneficial to improving childbirth ( indeed to improving anything).

[DemBones DemBones]

34. Perhaps you missed the fact that VVF and RVF were

common in the United States and Europe until the middle of the twentieth century. Besides the fact that proper OB care prevents fistulas, 90% of fistulas are correctable by surgery but that surgery is not available to most of the world's women.

Some of your assumptions are laughable and I don't have time to refute a lot of nonsense, but for the record, non-Muslim third-world countries are no paradise for women and infants, either.

[sandnsea]

18. Why? WHY???

You read this story and then you ask why women need doctors to deliver babies???? I must be missing something. She performed a caesarian on herself. What more evidence do you need that doctors are sometimes necessary in childbirth? Did you know childbirth used to kill more women than anything else?

[theHandpuppet]

20. Amazing, but not LBN

I heard this story on the tube some weeks ago and the actual "event" occurred in 2000.

[mumon]

21. answer to your question: lots of women died!

How did us humans survive 160,000 years without hospitals and doctors to deliver our babies? What do we need them for? Why can't families deliver their own babies and cut out the middle man and his fees?



Women's pelvises are notoriously narrow, and human baby heads are notoriously big. LOTS of women died in childbirth in times past. This is one of those evolutionary thingies that has kept our population in check.

Things like an episiotomy (sp), cesearean sections, etc. have saved many, many women and children.

Childbirth is very, very, difficult for alot of women and babies.

[jdj]

29. To the contrary, one of the greatest evolutionary steps

in the progression of ape to "man" was the widening of the female pelvis to accomodate the large brains of hominid species. All one has to do is compare a human female pelvis to that of a modern chimpanzee to get the picture. This and the swing in hominid species from estrus to menstruation is probably what paved the way for the homo sapiens to surge in population and rise to the top of the food chain. I would also guess that the invention of the chair and the sedentary lifestyle of modern day women has been more detrimental to childbirth than anything else, as primitive women squat to do everything including giving birth, and walk for miles each day as well, and are in much better physical condition, especially in the muscle areas that count. Countless children have been killed, maimed and brain damaged by ham-handed doctors with their forceps and suction cups,etc, including a friend of mine who was yanked out by forceps which resulted in her arm being broken.

Presently we are coming to a point where there seems to be a developing marriage between common sense and allopathic medicine with regards to childbirth. However it needs to be said that medical malpractice kills thousands of people a year in the U.S., many of them women and children. I believe the poster was referring to the warped belief system that has prevailed regarding women and all things female for the last 3-5000 years in so many (but not all) cultures, and which reached it's epoch during the middle ages when women all over europe (and a few in the U.S.), who traditionally were midwives and healers were slaughtered en masse, i.e. the 'witch trials", or 'witch burnings', so that christian males could gain control of medical practices and wipe out the last remnants of paganism. Not coincidentally wiped out with european paganism were women who had inestimable knowledge of plants and herbs, including and expecially those used for birth control and abortion, which is the whole point of male control of medicine and especially childbirth procedures anyway. At it's heart paternalistic society is concerned about lineage and very little else, explaining why gang rape of women in so prevalent during wartime.

[DemBones DemBones]

35. Your friend whose arm was broken when she was born

quite possibly had her life saved by the "ham-handed" use of forceps. My friend Jen's 12 pound baby had to have his shoulder dislocated in order to be born as he was too far in the birth canal to allow a C-section. Some women can give birth to a 12 lb. baby with no problem, others who are just as healthy and just as determined to deliver naturally can't give birth to one half that size. Frankly, evolutionary improvements notwithstanding, human females still have pelvic cavities that make for a tight squeeze in giving birth to human offspring, given the size of our offsprings' head.

As for evil male physicians replacing wise female midwives, it's a nice myth that ignores some harsh realities about childbirth. My friend Sharon has a brain-damaged son because he was delivered by a wonderfully warm and compassionate midwife who could not cope with a complication that arose. Midwives are great unless there's a complication they can't handle, and then you need an obstetrician right there right then since they are trained to handle all the complications. Sharon's midwife was backed up by an OB on call but that didn't put him in the delivery room soon enough so Sharon has to care for an adult son who's like a child

In other parts of the world, women still die from ectopic pregnancies, breech and transverse fetal presentations, placenta previa, etc. One of those complications would have killed me a quarter of a century ago if it hadn't been for a skilled surgeon who was also my OB-GYN. (That particular physician was a very compassionate man as well. It is possible to find male OB-GYN's who are not arrogant robots.)

Death in childbirth was natural for most of recorded history. Invoking gang rapes and the burning of witches/ wise women doesn't change those facts.

[Bridget Burke]

22. Conspiracy?

What a crackbrained comment. The birthing process can be dangerous to the mother and the child. Death or injury has been all too common, throughout history. The woman in this story is very strong & very lucky to have survived.

Midwife-attended births work fine for many women. But, even in traditional cultures, midwives are trained specialists. The "families" send for their help; unless the "families" are down drinking at the bar.

I've heard that Caesarians are overused. But, when needed, they can save lives. And they really ought to be done with the best medical care available.

[enki23]

23. and oh, the wonderful complications

i bet uterine prolapses were a lot of fun before modern medicine.

[demgurl]

25. I had a mid-wife for my first birth.

I will never do that again. She let me stay in labor for three days before admitting me to the hospital. They gave me meds so I could sleep and then, in the morning, she asked if I wanted to go home and continue with a natural birth! I said no way. All together I was in labor for 91 hours! I was in pain. I did not sleep. And my contractions were not close enough, in my mid-wife's opinion, to require me going to her office for the water birth.

I can not imagine what that poor woman went through! I really feel for her.

[bleedingheart]

26. I would be dead without modern medicine

Thanks to Magee Womens Hospital I am alive today.

Sorry...don't want to go back to old birthing techniques.

[Hell Hath No Fury]

27. "How did we survive"???

Many, many of us women didn't survive.

Have you ever gone to a really old cemetary and looked at the headstones?

I have.

One of the most startling things I have seen is headstone after headstone with a mother and child listed, both who died in childbirth. I went to one cemetary in Northern California that dated back to the Gold Rush days where those headstones amounted to almost half of the dead in the entire cemetary.

The birth process is a violent one, that can often need the expertise of a professional to save the mother, the baby or even both. And thank heavens we have the technology to help those that need help.

As for the increase in C-sections -- having worked for a law office that handled medical malpractice suits, I would say that doctors fears of being sued because of the many injuries to newborns that can happen during the birthing process play a huge role in that number.

[bleedingheart]

30. and many men went through wives like disposable wash clothes

due to the mortality rate of childbearing.

My husband and I were talking about it this weekend...we both agreed that the divorce rate today seems high in comparison to 100 years ago but then again women and men didn't live very long and a lot of men had more than one wife due to being widowed...

I had a cousin who died in the spring of 1918 in childbirth right after she had planted a garden, by the late summer of 1918 her husband's new wife was harvesting the vegetables. He married so quickly to gain a babysitter/caretaker for the kids and himself.

[struggle4progress]

33. Despite not knowing anything about surgery, ...

she doesn't bleed to death after cutting herself open? I'm at least skeptical.

Does anybody else need to be told "Don't try this"?

[DemBones DemBones]

37. Scepticism is definitely warranted!

I wonder how she managed to cut deep enough without cutting too deep, and if she damaged any internal organs. If she had her tubes tied, she must have been taken to a hospital and they must have been able to save her uterus. It seems much more unlikely than cutting off one's own arm as that trapped hiker did.

[DemBones DemBones]

38. Doing some research

in genealogy the other day, I was reading an article about historical expressions and learned of the expression "now wife." Men used this to refer to the wife they had "now," as opposed to the ones they'd already buried.
The world was very different 100, 200 years ago.

In a family Bible, I have the record of my great-great-grandparents losing their two eldest children to scarlet fever on the same day. Our lives have been much improved by modern medicine, despite its disadvantages and errors.

[my cuppa tea]

40. As wonderful as modern advanced medicine is

it might behoove us to make a bigger place for homebirths in our society. Not self-cesarians, obviously, but well monitored, midwife attended births. If there are no danger signs and if the midwife is prepared to transport the mother and baby at a moment's notice if complications arise, then it's really quite safe. It's also more calm and relaxed, as well as avoiding those doctors who would speed birth along by puncturing the amniotic sac which can result in greater trauma and tearing of the mother's tissues (when they haven't had the time to stretch naturally).

Again, advanced medicine is wonderful and has certainly made our lives safer and longer, but in the great majority of cases pregnancy and childbirth shouldn't be treated as a disease.

[nodehopper]

41. are you a doula?