There's more to worry about in addition to the matter of prenatal care. Are people dropping their bodily fluids onto the tracks? How is this not a public health crisis?!!
i have to say, the issue for me isn't so much that these women are giving birth on the toilet (like others have said, this can happen anywhere), but that whatever leaves your body and goes into the toilet just ends up on the train tracks. That seems to me to be the more significant problem that's illustrated in this story.
@unreliable narrator: The toilets on trains in the UK also drain straight on to the tracks. We have signs that tell you not to flush while you're in the station for just that reason. I always assumed this happened everywhere!
Ok, having never had a baby, I am a bit confused. Isn't there an umbilical cord that connects mama and baby, which is how baby gets mama's food and such when baby lives inside mama? So when the baby fell from this woman's vagina down the toilet onto the tracks, wasn't there a cord that connected them? Or would it just have, like, ripped? That seems dangerous. Not as dangerous as falling out of a toilet onto train tracks from a moving train. But still. Dangerous.
Can someone who's actually gone through a birth from the mama's point of view explain how this might work?
@Cimorene: the umbilical cord is attached to the placenta and amniotic sac, not to mommy. the attachment to mommy happens through a system of capillary exchanges between the uterus and the arterial system of the placenta, which belongs to baby. since the placenta came out with the baby, so did the umbilical cord.
the part of the birth that they don't show you on tv is when the mother has a few more contractions to get rid of the placenta. mini-labour.
@Gumbina80: Babies are made of this magically durable material, and we never even KNEW it cause we just never dropped 'em from speeding trains right onto the tracks.
@o-line: yeah! Half the women on that show unknowingly "poop" the baby out in the toilet. Maybe I was misinformed or something, but doesn't labor take a bit more effort than dropping the average deuce?
@Meangirl.is.for.the.Horde: I think the train stopped a mile after she jumped. Like, baby fell out, woman jumps from train and passenger pulls emergency break, train takes 1 mile to go from very fast to stopped. Inertia, and all.
Can someone who's given birth or knows something about this tell me how common this kind of quick, somewhat easy-seeming birth can be? I did not think babies could just 'pop out' like that.
@lodown: I know a girl on another board who had her baby in a bathtub waiting for the ambulance to come get them. She realized she was in labor, called her husband, he called an ambulance, she realized the baby was COMING and got in the tub and it popped right out.
I also know people who had several days of labor. Like ShanaElmsford said, every delivery is different.
@lodown: All the women on my mom's side of the family push once and voila, baby. My mom went into labor with me right after lunch and got home in time for dinner. Seriously. I was my mom's first (and only) kid, too. The downside was that the doctor on duty didn't believe her when she told him about her mother and aunts giving birth like this, and he wandered off, assuming that she was going to spend the next 16 hours in labor. A shocked nurse caught me coming out about three minutes later.
@lodown: Oh man, thanks for all the stories, guys! I'd always thought labor was usually hard and long. The exercise thing is an interesting angle. I wonder if kegels or something like that would help?
@schweppes: Yeah, this was my reaction. How would pre natal care figure into it? Even if you have the best care in the world, that isn't going to stop people from being in a situation where a baby might come out when they're on the toilet.
Women having babies on the toilet is pretty common - even in more developed countries. It's a pretty common response to go sit on the toilet when you're having abdominal pain.
Some women don't even know they are pregnant because they continue to have their period and don't show signs of significant weight gain. There was an interesting special on Discovery, I think, that detailed the stories of a few such women here in the US. I always thought it was so strange for a woman to not know she was pregnant, but turns out there are a lot of good reasons for it.
@sweetbeans: That is an interesting, and very good point. I had no idea this was so common. Never having been pregnant myself, I never even thought of having a baby on the toilet.
@Intern Katy: I had a friend who was a nurse and she told me about how pregnant women often get on the toilet. I guess there's so much discomfort and pressure that even if you know you're close to giving birth it still feels like you need to go. In this story, it's crazy how the baby just shot out of her without all the pushing. I had a friend who had a baby really quickly, and he was born with "rug burns" on his face.
@sweetbeans: There's also a lot of evidence to suggest that giving birth in a squatting position is much easier than lying down (abdominal muscle support, etc.). A toilet lets one squat pretty comfortably. Put that together with abdominal distress, and it's easy to see how babies would be the net result a chunk of the time.
When a wealthy American goes into labor in a grocery store or taxi, is that equally ominous? There could be bigger issues going on, but without any further information this sort of seems like any other baby coming... NOW situation. And with the popularity of train travel in India, it's not surprising that it's happened more than once.
So basically, in India one should never walk near or on railroad tracks as they are covered with human waste. And the poor baby was lying in that filth until the mother retrieved it? Ewwwww. Don't they have sanitary measures to collect and dispose of this stuff?
In Paris, you pay for a ticket to go underground and see the historic sewers. In Delhi, the sewers are free for the public to see and run openly in the streets.*
Seriously, there's so little working infrastructure to deal with the sewage problem in India that they're stopped trying. Hence the shit on the railroad tracks. Also the fact that the entire city of Delhi (17 million people, at last count) pumps its RAW sewage into the Yamuna River. The river looks like a slow trickle of black ooze, and has the consistency of a milkshake. No one will go near it -- even by Indian measures, people consider it toxic. The slums and the poor villages all over the country are severely under-supplied when it comes to facilities, and people have no choice but to shit in public places. You often see children playing in filth, because there's no other place
Its maddening.
Ask Indians, and they'll tell you that with one billion people, there's no way to control the problem, and they're doing the best they can. When you point to China, which has a similar population load and which has much, much better infrastructure to deal with this sort of thing, they will tell you that China is a dictatorship, and doesn't have to deal with the inefficiencies of electoral democracy. But SERIOUSLY. How hard can it be to just figure out a way to process all that shit? There's enough money, enough people, and definitely enough need for it to happen -- there's just no political will on the part of the country's elites, because they're long dealt with the problem by making sure that THEY have clean places to defecate, and by turning a blind eye to WHERE their shit goes. They don't have to live there, after all.
/rant
*joke lifted from some book I read. I claim no credit.
@Intern Katy: Given that poor women here in the States have little to no access to prenatal care, that part of the article sounded just a little bit ethnocentric and condescending. I'm sure it was unintentional, but I think that's what this comment was referring to.
Worst bathroom ever - Movie theater on 13th and Broadway in NYC. It was the day the prices all went above $11 and I lost my mind. I ran to the potty like a good girl before the movie and what I saw blew my mind. It was before 5PM and the toilet seat had been RIPPED off the toilet and strewn to the back of the stall, there was an empty bottle of some cheap ass vodka stuffed into the already filled sanitary napkin garbage and on top of that was a box containing a USED PREGNANCY TEST. And no, for the 1000th time, I didnt risk catching the cooties to see if she was preggers, but I can guess from the empty bottle of vodka she was. I will never forget that day.
When I was in my 20's I used to bartend at a Gentlemen's club. One evening the doorman came to the bar white as a sheet to ask me to watch the door for a moment, he had been in the mensroom and found a plunger handle up sticking out of a toilet. On said plunger was evidence of...well ...self violation.
We often wondered who would deface our plunger but we never found out who it was...
I have more of these stories, but I will wait till we have a Stripclub of Horrors thread.
@onestrawplz: Yeah the only thing we could do was laugh...we kept all other implements like brooms and such in a closet after that. Stripclub doorman is the worst job in the world.
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Can someone who's actually gone through a birth from the mama's point of view explain how this might work?
10/09/09
Now, I've had an incredibly fast birth before, but even still, it was several minutes and a little bit of effort before the placenta followed.
10/09/09
the part of the birth that they don't show you on tv is when the mother has a few more contractions to get rid of the placenta. mini-labour.
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My uterus does not know whether to cringe or applaud.
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I also know people who had several days of labor. Like ShanaElmsford said, every delivery is different.
10/09/09
I like these genes, personally.
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Some women don't even know they are pregnant because they continue to have their period and don't show signs of significant weight gain. There was an interesting special on Discovery, I think, that detailed the stories of a few such women here in the US. I always thought it was so strange for a woman to not know she was pregnant, but turns out there are a lot of good reasons for it.
10/09/09
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10/09/09
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10/09/09
In Paris, you pay for a ticket to go underground and see the historic sewers. In Delhi, the sewers are free for the public to see and run openly in the streets.*
Seriously, there's so little working infrastructure to deal with the sewage problem in India that they're stopped trying. Hence the shit on the railroad tracks. Also the fact that the entire city of Delhi (17 million people, at last count) pumps its RAW sewage into the Yamuna River. The river looks like a slow trickle of black ooze, and has the consistency of a milkshake. No one will go near it -- even by Indian measures, people consider it toxic. The slums and the poor villages all over the country are severely under-supplied when it comes to facilities, and people have no choice but to shit in public places. You often see children playing in filth, because there's no other place
Its maddening.
Ask Indians, and they'll tell you that with one billion people, there's no way to control the problem, and they're doing the best they can. When you point to China, which has a similar population load and which has much, much better infrastructure to deal with this sort of thing, they will tell you that China is a dictatorship, and doesn't have to deal with the inefficiencies of electoral democracy. But SERIOUSLY. How hard can it be to just figure out a way to process all that shit? There's enough money, enough people, and definitely enough need for it to happen -- there's just no political will on the part of the country's elites, because they're long dealt with the problem by making sure that THEY have clean places to defecate, and by turning a blind eye to WHERE their shit goes. They don't have to live there, after all.
/rant
*joke lifted from some book I read. I claim no credit.
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10/09/09
10/10/09
07/15/09
07/14/09
When I was in my 20's I used to bartend at a Gentlemen's club. One evening the doorman came to the bar white as a sheet to ask me to watch the door for a moment, he had been in the mensroom and found a plunger handle up sticking out of a toilet. On said plunger was evidence of...well ...self violation.
We often wondered who would deface our plunger but we never found out who it was...
I have more of these stories, but I will wait till we have a Stripclub of Horrors thread.
07/14/09
07/14/09