At midnight on March 5, 2000, Inés Ramírez Pérez had been in pain for 12 hours without a break.
She lived in a mountain village in Oaxaca, with no electricity, no running water, and the nearest hospital eight hours away by car. She had no medical training. There was no adult by her side. And she had already lost a baby in a previous birth.
She sat on a bench and drank three small glasses of strong liquor. She took a 15-centimeter kitchen knife.
It took her three attempts to cut open her abdomen. The wound is 17 centimeters long, much longer than the 10 centimeters of a normal C-section incision. She worked for close to an hour until she got her son out.
According to the doctor who treated her afterward, the baby breathed immediately and cried.
Before she fainted, she asked one of her children to go and get a nurse. The woman stitched up the wound with a sewing needle and cotton thread. Then they were taken to the hospital.
The case was reported in 2004 by Dr. R.F. Valle in a medical journal. Cases like this usually end with the death of the mother, the baby, or both.
This time, both survived.
Some women don’t wait for a miracle: they cut it out with their own hands.
