Inés Ramírez is the only person documented in medical literature to have survived a caesarean performed on herself.

Río Talea, a mountain village in Oaxaca, year 2000. Twelve hours of labor, a baby already lost the same way once before, and the nearest doctor eighty kilometers of bad road away.

She took a kitchen knife and did it herself.

Both she and her son survived: a local nurse stitched her up and she was properly operated on hours later.

The same desperate feat as Zenaida Arroyave’s, with a kinder ending.