Some People Would Call This Beautiful...

Here is a short video I found on YouTube of a woman delivering her child through a Caesarean Section. I have never seen something like this before and was actually quite surprised to find soemthing this gorey on YouTube. Everyone sitting around me just flipped out after seeing this video, but personally I can't see why people are so scared of it. I wouldn't go as far as other people and call it "beautiful" or anything like that, but it's definelty interesting how medicine has progressed thus far. I just read a chapter in Better where Dr. Gawande just talked about this very same thing.

In order for something like this to go smoothly, without any fatal accidents, so much has to go right. Gawande discussed some stories where women were in labor for absurd amounts of time, like 39 hours and crazy things like that. C Section births are almost always used as a last resort, because of the fact that its a full blown surgery where the doctor literally cuts the woman's abdomen open, and usually because women are just too scared to do it.

Like nothing else in human history, human birth has existed ever since the dawn of time obviously, and those in charge of seeing it through have always been pressured to make it work better. Child and maternal fatalities at one point were a common thing, most women would die because of infections, being in labor for too long, etc. And lots of infants would die from injuries they recieved during the labor process itself. In the medical community one was regarded as sort of a savior if he or she was to discover a new technique or invent some sort of contraption that would aid in the process, such as "forceps", or basically tongs used to pull the kid out if it's somehow wedged inside the mother and can't get out.

By far though, the Cesarean section is one of the strangest operations I have seen.