Woman gives herself C-section, doctor says

A woman in southern Mexico cut open her own womb with a knife and delivered a healthy baby boy in her rural home when problems developed during childbirth, doctors report in a medical journal.

The woman and her son, her ninth child, both survived despite an eight-hour car ride to the nearest hospital and waiting several hours for medical care once there, said co-author Dr. Rafael Valle, a Northwestern University obstetrician who said he learned about the case from a colleague in Mexico.

"She was asked, 'Why did you do that, do you know you could have died?' She said, 'Yes, but I wanted to save my baby,"' Valle said Wednesday.

"This is heroic to me," said Valle, who wrote the report with his colleague and two doctors who treated the woman at a rural hospital in the Mexican state of Oaxaca.

Valle said the case underscores the tragedy of lack of access to medical care that many people face worldwide.

"The main point of my article," he said, "is to make people aware that things like this should never happen."

The woman involved was 40, living in a dirt-floored house with no running water or electricity, and had previously experienced the death of a baby during childbirth, the authors said.

She was home alone when she went into labor, and fearing the same thing would happen when it appeared childbirth was not progressing, she decided to perform the crude C-section. She drank three small glasses of hard liquor first to numb the pain, he said.

"Rather than experience fetal death in utero again, she used her skills at slaughtering animals," the report said. "Apparently, she did not bleed excessively and asked one of her children to call a local nurse for help before she lost consciousness."

The nurse stitched up the woman's abdomen with an ordinary needle and thread, and the mother and baby were taken to Hospital General Dr. Manuel Velasco Suarez in San Pablo, eight hours away.

The incident happened about two years ago, Valle said. His report appears in the March issue of the International Journal of Gynecology and Obstetrics, published by the London-based International Federation of Gynecology and Obstetrics.

The article includes photographs of the woman's incision and of surgery used in the hospital to repair the wound.

While the incident sounds far-fetched, Valle said, "This is not a hoax."

The authors said there are other cases of women attempting the same thing, but none they could find in which the mother and child survived.