This cannot be understated – pregnancy is hard.
There is a growing awareness of how some prospective parents have spent thousands of dollars and months, if not years of time trying to get pregnant. – assuming that they are capable of doing so, that is.
On top of that, the entire process of pregnancy alone deals an incredible physical toll on the parent’s body as well.
For starters, your internal organs get squished and rearranged, your risk of osteoporosis increases as the fetus pulls nutrients from the body, and you have to change your entire lifestyle to accommodate a growing belly that can wake you in the middle of the night.
And that isn’t to say of the actual act of labor itself!
Aside from the incredible and intense pain that the parent has to endure from the contractions, there is the fact that the labor process itself can still be dangerous for both parent and child.
The evolution that modern medicine has undergone over the last two hundred years or so is a wondrous thing, and has undeniably and drastically reduced the mortality rates of mother and newborn baby.
However, the fact remains that nothing can truly be one hundred percent risk-free – all medical procedures one way or another will have risk associated with them.
Usually, it is caused by the human factor, as was the case in the decapitation of this Indian baby in the northern state of Rajasthan.
According to a report released by the Hindustan Times on the 10th of January, a baby had been decapitated by a male nurse during a particularly difficult delivery in a local government hospital on the 6th of January.
Local media claimed that the nurse had supposedly tugged at the infant’s torso with too much strength and had managed to pull the baby’s torso free, leaving the head still stuck inside the womb.
Without informing the parents about the mistake, the nurse and his fellow hospital staff members had the baby’s torso sent to the hospital mortuary.
They then informed the family that the mother had to be moved to a different hospital.
There, the doctors of the second hospital conducted an operation, whereupon they found the baby’s head that had remained inside the mother’s womb.
The mother’s life is reportedly now in a dire state, and it remains to be seen whether she will survive.
In the meantime, the infant’s father claims that the hospital staff had not only failed to let the parents know about what had happened, but had even attempted to hide the corpse from the family.
The Indian police have since charged the nurses with causing death by negligence, and have filed a case accordingly.
As horrible as an incident like this can be, this isn’t the first time something like this has happened either.
Last year, Dr. Vaishnavy Laxman, a 43-year-old British gynaecologist, had decapitated the unborn baby despite the many opportunities she had to prevent such an incident from occurring.
Hopefully, something like this will not happen again in the near future, and that all present and future doctors will learn from this situation.
