In 2000, Inés Ramírez Pérez, a 40-year-old woman from a remote village in Oaxaca, Mexico, performed a self-C-section with a   kitchen knife after 12 hours of agonizing labor.

Facing the same obstructed delivery that tragically killed her previous baby, she refused to lose another child. At midnight, she drank three glasses of liquor for pain relief, sat on a wooden bench under a dim bulb, and — drawing on her experience butchering meat — made three attempts to cut a 17 cm vertical incision through skin, fat, muscle, and uterus.

After an hour of self-surgery, she delivered a healthy baby boy, cut the umbilical cord with scissors, wrapped him warmly, and bandaged her wound with clothes.
Miraculously, both mother and son survived — a medical first with no formal training.