Mother describes harrowing experience of DIY c-section to save her son

When labor and delivery goes wrong, some mothers find themselves heartbroken, with stillborn babies. For one mother, that was what happened: two years ago, her baby died after she experienced obstructed labor in which the baby got stuck in the birth canal. The 40-year-old mom, who had eight children, got pregnant again — and this time, she was determined to save her baby’s life when she experienced obstructed labor again, taking matters into her own hands.

Discover Magazine outlined the mom’s story, explaining that the mom was experienced in slaughtering animals, and did not want her baby to die again. “She took 3 small glasses of hard liquor and, using a kitchen knife, sliced her abdomen in 3 attempts in the right paramedial region, cut the uterus itself longitudinally, and delivered a male infant that breathed immediately and cried,” the magazine reported. “Apparently, she did not bleed excessively and asked one of her children to call a local nurse for help before she lost consciousness.”

The mother, who performed a c-section on herself in the year 2000, miraculously survived and talked about her experience with The Telegraph. Ines Ramirez lives in a remote village in Mexico, and explained how she knew she had to perform the surgery on herself if she wanted her baby to survive. “I had seven children before Orlando,” she said in the interview. “There was no problem with the births. But the eighth baby died. My waters broke and the midwife said I needed a caesarean but I couldn’t get to the hospital in time. I felt the baby struggling but then it stopped moving. When I was seven months pregnant with Orlando, one night the pain began. It was terrible. I couldn’t bear it. I started to panic. I knew I had to do something or this baby would die too. I knew I had to get it out somehow.”

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One of her older children ran into the village to find someone with medical experience, who helped stitch her back together the best he could with a sewing needle and thread. Ramirez had pushed her organs back into her abdominal cavity on her own, and then they drove an hour away to a clinic to see a doctor. “A lady doctor saw me,” Ramirez said. “She took one look and said, ‘You’ve got to go to San Pedro’. They put me and the baby in the back of a pick-up truck.” So they drove another two hours to a hospital, where the doctor she saw at the clinic had already phoned ahead. Remarkably, both Ramirez and her baby survived.

“I couldn’t believe it,” Dr. Onorio Galvan, head of the obstetrics department at the hospital in San Pedro, said. “There was no sepsis in the wound, no internal bleeding. She was back on her feet in a couple of days.” Ramirez is believed to be the one of only five cases of a self-inflicted c-section in which both the mother and baby survived.