By Lisa Adams
Rio Talea - Alone in her one-room cabin high in the mountains of southern Mexico, Ines Ramirez Perez felt the pounding pains of a child insistent on entering the world.
Three years earlier, she had given birth to a dead baby girl. As her labour intensified, so did her concern for this unborn child.
The sun had set hours ago. The nearest clinic was 80km away over rough terrain, and her husband, her only assistant during a half-dozen previous births, was drinking at a cantina. She had no telephone.
'I thought that God would save both our lives' So at midnight, after 12 hours of constant pain, the petite, 40-year-old mother of six sat down on a low wooden bench. She took several gulps from a bottle of rubbing alcohol, grabbed the 15cm knife that she used for butchering animals and pointed it at her belly.
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And then she began to cut.
Under the light of a single dim bulb, Ramirez sawed through skin, fat and muscle before reaching inside her uterus and pulling out her baby boy. She says she cut his umbilical cord with a pair of scissors and then passed out.
That was March 5, 2000. Today, the baby she delivered, Orlando Ruiz Ramirez, is a rambunctious, playful four-year-old. And Ines Ramirez is recognised internationally as a modern miracle. She is believed to be the only woman known to have performed a successful Caesarean section on herself.
In an interview at her isolated, wood-plank home, she described her experience in halting Spanish, accented by her native Zapotec.
'I had slaughtered chickens and other animals' "I couldn't stand the pain anymore," she said. "And 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."
Though there were no witnesses available to confirm her account, the two obstetricians who examined her 12 hours after the birth are wholly convinced.
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