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Mexican woman gives herself C-section, doctors report CHICAGO (AP)  A woman in Mexico cut open her own womb with a knife and delivered a healthy baby boy in her rural home when problems developed during labor, doctors report in a medical journal. The woman and her son, her ninth child, both survived despite an eight-hour car ride to the nearest hospital and a wait of several hours once she got there, said co-author Dr. Rafael Valle, a Northwestern University obstetrician who learned about the case from a colleague. "She was asked, 'Why did you do that? Do you know you could have died?' She said, 'Yes, but I wanted to save my baby,'" Valle said Wednesday. He added: "This is heroic to me." The authors of the report said there are other cases of women attempting the same thing, but none they could find in which the mother and child survived. The woman, 40, lived in a dirt-floor house with no electricity or running water and had previously lost a baby during childbirth, the authors said. She was alone when she went into labor, and fearing the same thing would happen when it appeared childbirth was not progressing, she decided to perform the crude C-section. She drank three small glasses of hard liquor first to numb the pain, he said. "Rather than experience fetal death in utero again, she used her skills at slaughtering animals," the report said. "Apparently, she did not bleed excessively and asked one of her children to call a local nurse for help before she lost consciousness." The nurse stitched up the woman's abdomen with an ordinary needle and thread, and the mother and baby were taken to a hospital in the Mexican state of Oaxaca. The incident happened about two years ago. The report appears in the March issue of the International Journal of Gynecology and Obstetrics, along with photographs of the woman's incision. Copyright 2005 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.