Caesarean section (剖腹产, 帝王切開, 제왕절개)

What a time to be alive: we have the internet at our fingertips, indoor plumbing, personal showers available at any time, food stocked in neat categories to shop from, almost anything you could ever dream of available upon a click of a button on Amazon, and....Caesarian sections don't require the mother dying. Of all the things you learn about childbirth, one of the many things is how common mothers died during childbirth before modern scientific advances, so to give birth was literally risking your life, and in case of C-sections, it was a death sentence back when it began in the B.C. era: they just cut the mother's stomach, pulled out the baby, and left the mother to die. Pretty disturbing stuff. Nowadays, C-sections are pretty common and come with a very minimal chance of adverse damage and certainly death is not on the table, but it's still a big sacrifice for the mothers as the recovery time is much longer than natural births. And why do they call it Caesarian section? Supposedly Julius Caesar was born from one, but that's not been confirmed, more of an apocrophyl story like Hannibal crossing the Alps with elephants. I was born through Caesarian section, not that I remember it happening. I do remember a little bit about my sister being delivered through C-section, and my mom spent 2 days in teh hospital afterwards. The doctor who performed the c-section also made a mistake and made a small incision into my sister's head, of which she had a scar for the first few years of her life, without causing any brain damage or developmental issues luckily (that we know of). Still, it's not the easiest of processes, and intuitively it seems pretty daunting: There's a human being somewhere inside the mother's stomach, and your job is to cut around the baby without touching the baby with the scalpel. Maybe one of the things that we might entrust AI with in the future, the precise cuts. I can barely figure out where the baby is now when I touch MJ's belly, even though MJ is pointing out where the kicks are coming from. I'm just looking at a sea of belly, no indications of any human life anything (life walking on the surface of the moon). And how do you know if the baby is head first or feet first? if the baby is moving around during the C-section? She's moving around a lot now, what if she gets nervous and starts thrashing around because suddenly a hole has opened up to the world? The answer is probably ultrasound and other scientifcally proven techniques, which is why the doctors get paid the big bucks, I guess. Philosophically, that's a pretty significant moment and metaphor for one's entry into this world: The baby is in a dark place in the mother's belly, kind of existing in this world but not yet, kind of a limbo before wherever we all come from and this world, can't see anything, can't hear anything, can't go anywhere, and then when you're ready to join the world, suddenly.......you go through the portal of your mother's belly into the next world, our world. It's really like the movie The Truman Show, once you go through those doors, you can't go back: the world is a wonderful, delightful place but also a dark, dangerous place...apparently we're starting with generation beta now, not even generation alpha, and this new generation of people are going to be growing up in a world of AI, robots, something we could never have imagined......maybe one day they'll come up with something more advanced than C-sections, like the baby will just be teleported out of the woman's body, or some sort of womb-simulated area that babies grow in instead of the mother's womb.... who knows? Although, childbirth seems like one of the only things left that is not totally explained by science, there's an aspect of magic and creating life out of seemingly nothing is one of the few miracles humans can perform. It doesn't make sense, but it happens, and now the C-section part makes a lot of sense scientifcally, but the numbing the pain part and stitching the scar up, that's also miraculous. Hoping for a great c-section!