Had pre-natal yoga today, and got minorly empowered-yet-creeped-out when the Calmbirth instructor was talking about how natural and instinctive childbirth should be – and pointed to the example of the woman in the US who gave birth to her baby naturally while still in a coma.

Whoa.

Dug around on the interwebs and found a couple of examples of babies born while the mother was in a coma:

There are probably many, many other bad-news stories that don’t make the news – but these are the few good ones that do, and made me understand just how frightfully well-engineered our bodies are.

And then I read the one about the Swine Flu victim who got induced into a coma because of suspected Swine Flu barely a few hours after she found out she was 33 weeks pregnant.

Yes. 33 weeks pregnant. And she didn’t know. Talk about a state of unconsciousness.

How do you NOT know you’re pregnant? An extremely cruisy pregnancy, I guess. Perhaps a slight self-delusion that all the bumps and kicks from Week 22 was Just A Lotta Gas. Some women spot through their pregnancies, which might explain the Where Did My Period Go? mystery. But then I got to reading about women who get the shock of their lives when they deliver another human being after “a massive tummy ache”, and yeah. It’s not just the big-boned who hide the pregnancy so well, even they can’t see it. Skinny ones can have absolutely no idea either.

I don’t get it, but it seems to happen often enough… so who am I to judge?