World's Toughest Woman

Ines Ramírez Pérez is a peasant woman living in rural Mexico. She speaks Zapotec but not Spanish and has no medical training. She nevertheless performed a successful caesarean section on herself: both she and her baby survived.

Ramírez was alone in her cabin in Rio Talea, Southern Mexico when her labour started. The nearest midwife was more than 50 miles away over rough terrain and rough roads and her husband was drinking at a cantina. Rio Talea has 500 people and only one phone, but it was not nearby.

At midnight, on 5 March 2000 — after 12 hours of continual pain and little advancement in labour, Ramírez sat down on a bench, drank from a bottle of rubbing alcohol, and used a kitchen knife to cut open her abdomen. Ramírez cut through her skin in a diagonal line from across her stomach to below her navel (a typical C-section incision is well below the navel). After operating on herself for an hour, she reached inside her uterus and pulled out her baby boy. She then severed the umbilical cord with a pair of scissors and became unconscious. When she regained consciousness, she wrapped clothes around her bleeding abdomen and asked her 6-year-old son, Benito, to run for help. Several hours later, the village health assistant found Perez alert and lying beside her live baby. He sewed her 7-inch incision with an available needle and thread. She was eventually taken to the nearest hospital, where two obstetricians examined her and the baby: they found both alive and well but could not explain why.

Describing her experience in her native Zapotec language, Ramírez said, “I couldn’t stand the pain anymore. If my baby was going to die, then I decided I would have to die, too. But if he was going to grow up, I was going to see him grow up, and I was going to be with my child. I thought that God would save both our lives.”