The Craziest Places Women Have Given Birth
Dr. Pari was featured as a guest contributor in the article below, originally posted for Women’s Health Magazine by Korin Miller, July 20, 2015.
A woman in Texas recently experienced every pregnant woman’s nightmare: She delivered her baby on the way to a birthing center. Oh, and her husband filmed the entire thing while he continued to drive.
According to Houston’s KHOU, Lesia Pettijohn and her husband, Jonathan, had been driving to a birthing center for more than an hour in bad traffic when Lesia went into the final stages of labor.
The couple have two other children, and since Lesia says she got to the hospital too early with them, she wanted to wait a little longer with her third child.
Jonathan kept one hand on the wheel and the other on his Go-Pro camera the entire time while he kept driving. “The only reason I would pull over is if there is something wrong that needed to be dealt with immediately,” he said. (So we guess his wife giving birth didn’t qualify?)
To her credit, Lesia kept her cool the whole time and didn’t even curse her husband out when he said “We did it!” after she gave birth…in a moving car…on camera.
Very fast deliveries (known as a precipitous delivery in medical circles) aren’t the norm, but they do happen. “Every year, hundreds of women deliver in emergency rooms, cars, homes, and ambulances before they can make it to the hospital,” says board-certified ob-gyn Pari Ghodsi, M.D. “Overall only two percent of births are precipitous.”
Ghodsi has had several patients who’ve delivered en route to a hospital or birthing center, and so has ob-gyn Sheryl Ross, M.D., a women’s health specialist at Providence Saint John’s Health Center in Santa Monica, California.
“One patient was having her fifth baby, and from the time she felt her first contraction, delivered an hour later,” says Ross. “Her husband delivered the baby in the car.”
Before you panic, know this: The likelihood of this happening to you is extremely low, and it’s even more rare if it’s your first kid. Women who have a precipitous labor tend to already have at least one child, have a very good pain tolerance, and may have a history of a fast labor, says Ross.
But it does happen. Here are some of the craziest places women have given birth:
On a Plane Mid-Flight
A woman gave birth on a Southwest Airlines flight from San Francisco to Arizona last year. Here’s the (even more) insane part: Fellow passengers didn’t realize she was in labor until they heard the baby crying and the woman’s husband calling for help. The umbilical cord was cut with a pair of beauty scissors that another passenger (who had somehow smuggled them past TSA) provided. The plane was diverted, and mother and baby were fine.
In a Library
In 2009, Dominique Trevino was riding a bus on the way to the hospital when she started having contractions, reports the Denver Post. A woman on the bus (who worked at the hospital) noticed what was happening, called for an ambulance, and told Trevino to get off at the library. Once she made it inside, Trevino lay down on the floor, pushed twice, and her baby girl came out. Says Dawn, “I felt like I was dying.”
At a Post Office
An expectant mom in England was visiting the post office in 2009 when she suddenly went into labor, the BBC reports. Baby girl Dulce was born before paramedics could arrive. Naturally, the postmaster put the baby on the postal scale.
In an Elevator
In 2012, a pregnant woman in Tacoma, Washington, made it to the hospital, but she became trapped in an elevator with a nurse and a midwife, Tacoma’s K5 reports. Her baby boy was born minutes later, and it took two more hours to get the elevator doors open. The woman’s husband was stuck outside the elevator the whole time.
At the Mall
Chastity Davis, 19, gave birth outside of a Sears at Michigan’s Fashion Square Mall in 2010. She and a stranger got blankets from a store and rubber gloves from a nail salon for the delivery. Baby Devin arrived before the ambulance did.
At a Strip Club
Okay, it was in a strip club parking lot, but still. A woman in Tennessee gave birth to a baby girl last year in a strip club parking lot in the back of a taxi on her way to the hospital. “They had to pull over because she was actually giving birth,” fire department spokesman Brian Haas, who responded to a 911 call, told The Tennessean. “It just happened to be at that particular location.” (The club offered the new mom pink clothes for her little one.)
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