Traumatic C-Section - TV Tropes

"Hey, look! A womb with a view!"

— Rich, Cannibal Campout

• +Anima: Cooro fell into a church when he was a baby, having become +Anima during his postmortem delivery, while his mother's newly deceased body was being consumed by crows. The nuns there took him in and raised him.
• In the 3rd Fushigi Yuugi OVA, the fake Suzaku uses the threat of this against Mayo to get her to pray for the destruction of Konan. He tells her that Taka plans to gather the other Seishi and kill Mayo and rip the baby out of her in the process.

• In Druuna: Carnivora, the eponymous character has a nightmare where she's heavily pregnant and trying to run away from a bunch of scary monsters before being rescued by a sinister group of Mad Doctors who proceed to cut open her belly.
• One happens off-panel in the Nicaragua arc of Fury: My War Gone By, led by The Punisher MAX villain Barracuda during his military days. Fury is investigating Barracuda's activities and finds the remains of a village destroyed by his Contra forces, with horribly mangled bodies everywhere, including a corpse of a pregnant woman who had her stomach cut open and her baby stomped on.

  Fury: Jesus fucking Christ almighty.

• In a flashback sequence in Halloween: The First Death of Laurie Strode, a young Michael Myers is shown daydreaming about cutting Baby Laurie out of his mother during a meal.
• One Spider-Man storyline involves the Venom symbiote being captured by a Crazy Survivalist group which forcibly extracts five "seeds" from it to create five new symbiotes for their Super-Soldier project.

• In born of hell('s kitchen), the caesarean happens in a hospital; it's the circumstances that are traumatizing, as Kilgrave uses his Compelling Voice power to force the surgery on Jessica and make her waive her parental rights off immediately afterwards, without even letting her hold or see the baby.
• In Crucible (Mass Effect), this was done to Amata, the wife of Gaius, Garrus and Shepard's son from the Bad Future. Amata was still alive when her stomach was cut open and her daughter was ripped out of it, still kicking and screaming before the quarians shot the mother in the head (they also killed her son before that). After that, the baby was taken to a lab to be experimented on. Judging from hundreds of dead Hybrid babies' bodies being tested, cut apart and preserved in that place, Amata was not the first or only victim.
• In Day of Reckoning, a Comics Nix X-Men fanfic, Cyclops mutilates Jean Grey, and her fetus falls out.
• The Racket-Rotter Chronicles: The Builder subjects Silver to one in Arc 3, after slashing her neck. She is then left to die with only her (presumably) stillborn child for company.

• In Felidae, a dead cat is found ripped open and surrounded by fetuses.

• At the beginning of 8 Ball Clown, 8-Ball has a pregnant woman in his basement. He uses a knife to cut open her belly and pulls the baby out.
• Arguably the most infamous scene in The Anthropophagus Beast is Nikos ripping out a baby, and eating it in front of its dying mother. It's even worse in The Remake, due to the baby obviously being alive when Nikos takes a bite out of its head.
• After an argument with his girlfriend, the lead killer in August Undergrounds Penance does this to a random woman.
• Automaton Transfusion re-creates the scene from The Anthropophagus Beast above almost exactly, but with a zombie.
• In Black Sun The Nanking Massacre, a Japanese soldier cuts a Chinese civilian's baby out with his bayonet.
• A fetus is cut out and devoured in Cannibal Campout.

  "Smells like a girl... tastes like a girl."

• At the end of one of the Carnosaur movies, a Mad Scientist gives herself one of these by clawing open her own abdomen because she's pregnant with little dinosaur babies and wants to make sure they survive.
• The premise of The Clinic is that pregnant women are abducted by an underground organization, have their babies removed, and are made to kill each other in a twisted contest that prospective adopters use to judge which of the stolen babies they want.
• One of the many endless gore scenes in The Coma Brutal Duel involves a ripped-out fetus being stomped on.
• During the making of Dawn of the Dead (1978), a pregnant extra suggested that her character should be shown having her baby ripped out by the zombies. Director George A. Romero and SFX guru Tom Savini gave a resounding "No. Just… No" Reaction.
• Dog Bite Dog ends with the main character performing an impromptu C-section on his pregnant wife as she is dying from a fatal injury, in a last-ditch attempt to save the baby.
• Forever Evil (1987) has a random Dream Sequence where an undead woman pulls out her demonic baby.
• Seeing as how it's an abortion-themed horror film, Hanger of course features this.
• Inside (2007) centers on an insane woman who wants to cut out the main character's baby, intent on having it replace her own dead child.
• In Las Vegas Bloodbath, Sam kills Barbara by cutting out her baby, which he casually throws at the wall afterward. It is later found crammed into a toilet.
• In Mad Max: Fury Road, a heavily pregnant Angharad has her baby cut from her body as she dies from her injuries, in the hope of saving its life. It doesn't work.
• The opening of Madness has one of the killers stomp on a pregnant woman's stomach so hard that what looks like her bloodied baby shoots out from between her legs.
• In The Mutilator, a character mentions that his father once caught a shark and slit it open, causing roughly a dozen or so baby sharks to messily spill out.
• During a test screening of the My Bloody Valentine 3D, a viewer asked if it was Megan's unborn child and not her heart that the miner cut out since the camera doesn't linger on what was ripped out for very long. It was her heart, and director Patrick Lussier mentions how squicked out he was by the baby assumption in the film's commentary.
• In a variant, the pregnant female from Orca: The Killer Whale was terribly injured by a fishing boat and entangled in its lines. When she's hauled out of the water, the trauma causes a spontaneous miscarriage and a half-formed orca fetus is expelled onto the deck of the boat.
• Prometheus has a particularly scarring one. It ends up creating a squid-like Facehugger which grows to a giant size. Zoinks.
• The Shivers, one of Todd Sheets's many obscure little films, has a pregnant woman de-fetus herself due to the evil's influence.
• Invoked but ultimately averted in the opening scene of Shoot 'em Up. Smith follows a thug who is chasing after a heavily pregnant woman, which said thug is attempting to kill. The thug whips out a knife and threatens to rip the baby out of the woman's stomach, but Smith arrives and kills the man before he can do so.
• Near the end of Skyline, Elaine is dumped into a chamber on the alien ship along with other pregnant women, where an appendage of the ship works to forcibly extract the fetuses from the captives' bodies.
• This implied to have been done to the pregnant victim in Snuff 102.
• Snuff Movie: In Premature Burial, the film within the film, Dr. Culpepper does this: cutting the unborn baby from Mrs. Maezel when he believes he can only save one of them. Later, the psychotic home invaders cut Mary's child from her in imitation of Premature Burial. The child, Marco, survives but suffers permanent disabilities.
• The fetus ripping from Terror Firmer.
• Us (2019): One of the more disturbing parts of Red's Motive Rant mentions this. Due to her Psychic Link with Adelaide, she had to imitate all her actions and live out a shadow of her life, and thus got pregnant with her son Pluto at the same time Adelaide got pregnant with Jason. Jason had to be born via C-section, and thus, so did Pluto. But while Adelaide got a routine C-section done in a hospital by professionals, with the assistance of painkillers, Red had to rip Pluto out of her body in a dirty underground tunnel by herself, feeling every bit of it. She understandably considers this to be one of the worst moments of her generally miserable existence.
• The first Violent Shit movie ends with a pregnant Karl ripping himself open to let the baby out.
• Old footage found by the characters in Xtro III: Watch the Skies shows an alien's young being ripped out of the parent while she(?) is in the middle of being vivisected.

• One of the tortures inflicted upon the female mutant in Apeshit.
• The Bible: It is mentioned, specifically in the prophetic books of the Old Testament, and is involved with conflicts involving pagan nations. The Assyrians (one of the most brutal and most effective armies of the ancient Middle East) are mentioned as doing this among other grisly practices. Even at the time, a woman having her baby torn from her womb was considered the worst calamity to happen to a nation at war, but nowadays it is considered a war crime of complete sociopathy.
• In Breaking Dawn, Edward rips open Bella's womb to retrieve their unborn child from her body with his teeth because both the nature of the pregnancy and the state of Bella's body didn't allow for any conventional birthing process to take place.
• One of the Chakona Space side stories has a variation (and rare heroic example) done on a pregnant taur who was already very definitely dead at the scene of a terrorist attack.
• Earth's Children: In The Valley of Horses, Jetamio dies in labor due to complications, after which the shaman cuts her open in a desperate attempt to save her unborn child. Sadly, the baby dies too, leaving Jetamio's mate and the father of the child devastated. It's a terrible situation for everyone else involved too, though Thonolan takes it especially hard.
• Horrifically, this is actually Older Than Feudalism. It goes back to the root of all Western literature, The Iliad, in which Agamemnon scolds his brother Menelaos for showing mercy to a Trojan:

  Agamemnon: Not a single one of them must escape sheer destruction at our hands. Not even if a mother carries one in her belly and he is male, not even he should escape.

• A Mad Scientist may or may not have done this to one of his test subjects in Jason X: Death Moon.
• In Maledicte, Dantalion performs one on Amarantha after her carriage crashes to ensure the survival of an heir, even though the mother might live if he doesn't.
• The Saga of the Volsungs: After seven years of pregnancy, King Rerir's wife orders her child to be cut out of her body, even though she knows it will kill her. Thus, the hero Volsung is born.
• One scene in Scarlett features Scarlett O'Hara going through this.
• A Song of Ice and Fire:
  • An incident from the childhood of Prince Joffrey is alluded to in Cersei's chapters which provides some early warning signs of his later psychopathy — while the details are sketchy, it's implied that he found a pregnant cat and cut her open to see what the kittens looked like.
  • Historically, when Queen Alyssa Velaryon was pregnant with her second child by Rogar Baratheon, she was already 47. Something went wrong during the pregnancy and she went into labor a month early. She gave permission for the maester to cut her open to save her baby, who survived (but she didn't).
• A Thousand Splendid Suns features a variation involving what should be a normal medical caesarean. When Laila gives birth to her second child, her baby is in the breach position and so she needs a C-section to save its life. Unfortunately, the women's hospital has limited supplies and so they will have to do it without anaesthesia. Laila's response? "Cut me open and give me my baby." Mariam is with her the whole time and thinks to herself how much she admires Laila for the amount of time that passes before she starts screaming in pain. Laila and the baby both survive.
• In The Time Traveler's Wife, fetuses time-travel out of the womb on several occasions. This is extremely messy and disturbing.
• A mild example, in which the victim is a salmon, is mentioned in Unseen Academicals. Still, it's only brought up for just how disturbing it was for young Vetinari to see all those cute little otter cubs eating all those little salmon eggs...

  Vetinari: Mother and children, dining upon mother and children. And that's when I first learned about evil.

• In an episode of Criminal Minds, a delusional woman does this to acquire the placenta for her to eat.
• CSI-verse:
  • In CSI, Doc Robbins gets the rare-for-an-M.E. chance to save a life when he realizes that a teenage girl who'd hanged herself just minutes before he and Nick arrived on-scene still has a living fetus inside her. A hasty C-section with improvised tools saves the baby, and the team tracks down the ex-boyfriend, who had no idea the girl had been pregnant when they broke up but is still willing to be a father to their daughter.
  • In the CSI: NY episode "The Box", a young pregnant woman agrees to let a childless couple adopt her baby in return for them paying for her medical care and living expenses but changes her mind shortly before her delivery date. The husband angrily shoves her while they're on a second-floor landing and she falls down the stairs, breaking her neck. Figuring an ambulance can't get there in time, he grabs a large kitchen knife and cuts her open to get the baby out. He then hides her body in the trunk of his car for a few days before abandoning it in a junkyard.
• ER:
  • "Love's Labor Lost" culminates in a horrifying emergency C-section. One TV critic says it changed how she thought about her body and life in general.

    As the episode unfurls, one thing goes wrong and then another — the baby's shoulder gets stuck, the mother's blood pressure drops — until a panicked Greene performs a brutal emergency C-section. "What did you use, a chainsaw?" asks the obstetrician when she finally shows up. Although the baby is saved, the woman dies, her body transformed from living person into scooped-out husk in a matter of moments.

  • Another episode has Kerry Weaver doing one of these in an ambulance that has crashed due to a torrential rainstorm. In this case, though, Kerry a) genuinely had no other option and b) acted quickly and excellently enough that both mother and baby made it through without major complications.
• Farscape: When Living Ship Moya gives birth to a Leviathan gunship, its weaponry gets this smaller Leviathan stuck in Moya's birth canal, so it has to fire its main gun on a low-intensity setting to break free. Though the main drama is that Chiana is trying to assist the birth and has to Outrun the Fireball from this so-called "low" setting.
• In I, Claudius, Caligula impregnates his sister, then cuts her open and eats the baby.
• In an episode of Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, the Victim of the Week is a woman who was nearly killed when her husband cut her baby out, convinced that she was having an affair and that the child wasn't his. It was — and the baby died.
• Happens to Violet in Private Practice when a patient becomes convinced that Violet's baby is hers.
• In Rizzoli & Isles, Maura has to perform a high-speed C-section on a heavily pregnant woman who'd been fatally stabbed mere moments earlier, while Jane gives the already-dead woman CPR to keep blood moving long enough for the fetus to be saved.
• Silent Witness: In "Undertone", it is revealed that a murdered woman was heavily pregnant when she died and the killer performed a crude C-section with a kitchen knife to remove the baby (she was already dead or at least unconscious at the time, but everyone is still horrified). Much of the story revolves around the team trying to find the missing baby as well as locate the killer.
• Slasher: Sarah's mother was murdered by the original Executioner when she was highly pregnant with her daughter. In something of a subversion, while he did violently cut her baby out of her womb, instantly killing her, he intentionally kept the infant Sarah alive until the cops arrived on the scene.
• A Song of Ice and Fire:
  • In Game of Thrones, this happens during the Red Wedding. Robb Stark decided to Marry for Love instead of marrying one of Lord Frey's daughters, so the first person to be killed as revenge was his pregnant wife Talissa, who was stabbed right through her womb.
  • House of the Dragon:
    • More directly childbirth-related, the first episode has a Sadistic Choice for King Viserys Targaryen: if the maesters don't intervene, both his wife Queen Aemma and their baby will die. Intervening would mean a C-section (while she's conscious) after which she will bleed to death — an even worse death than the one she'd have if they do nothing — but it could save the baby. He orders them to do it out of the need for an heir to the kingdom. His wife's belly is cut open (the scene is quite gruesome) to take the baby out, and she dies... and then it was All for Nothing in the end, as the baby dies too anyway a few hours after the birth.
    • In the sixth episode, Viserys's brother Prince Daemon is given the same choice with regards to his wife Laena and their child, but he's just shaken his head when they notice Laena has gotten up and gone outside to command her dragon to spare her the agony by immolating her.
• Spartacus: Blood and Sand: This is implied to have happened to Ilithyia in Spartacus: Vengeance.
• In The Walking Dead (2010), Lori goes into labor while hiding from walkers in the boiler room of a prison. Maggie then has to deliver the baby via a C-section using a crude hunting knife, and Lori dies.

• Bloodwash features a Serial Killer known as the Womb Ripper who does exactly what his name says to women. The ending reveals that the killer was in fact a missing woman thought to be one of the Ripper's victims. She was having an affair with a man and when she got pregnant, he tried to kill her. The woman survived, but her baby didn't; she snapped, and killed women who had what she didn't.
• In Martha Is Dead, Giulia cuts open her sister’s corpse to confirm her pregnancy.
• Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater: The Boss went into labor during the invasion of Normandy. Naturally, being in the middle of a war zone without access to a proper medical facility, drastic measures needed to be taken. The most badass thing of all is that she performed the C-section on herself. Out pops baby Revolver Ocelot, in the middle of a battle.

• Happens in Eight Cicadas to Annette. As a hybrid, she is immune to human painkillers and couldn't be anesthetized for delivering her daughter. It ends with her punching out a nurse and spending time in therapy.
• Jack (David Hopkins): Kane threatens to do this to Wendy in one arc, as seen here.
• Parodied in The Last Days of FOXHOUND when they flashed back to the Snake Eater example in the Video Games folder above. The Boss is completely unfazed about it, even saying 'hard part's over' when Ocelot is born. However, the baby's father, the Sorrow is so traumatized by witnessing it that he ends up fainting.

• Averted in Gayle: while Gayle's daughter Terry was born in a premature c-section, this was apparently at Gayle's request because she was sick of being pregnant and not being able to give it 150% in spin class. Talk about establishing one's an Abusive Parent right out of the gate.
• Metamor City: This happens to Abbey Preston, thanks to her abusive boyfriend. While she survives, she is extremely traumatised for years afterwards, especially as Sasha is killed at the same time. It gets worse - see, she's psychic, and it's hereditary, and she had even held simple conversations with her child in the womb. When her child died, she heard her scream.
• SCP Foundation: SCP-1048 is an animate teddy bear that can make more of its kind using any random material, including a fetus it somehow removed from a dozing employee.

• This bit from The Simpsons's version of the Nativity story.

  Doctor Nick: I've got some very good news: Caesar just invented the Cesarean! [whips out a large saw]
  Marge/Mary: GET HIM OUT OF HERE!

• In the Star Trek: Lower Decks episode "Caves", Engineer Rutherford (a guy) is impregnated when a dying cute blue alien woman touches his face and implants her clone-daughter in his abdomen. As said clone-daughter is fully gestated within seconds, and Rutherford lacks the necessary orifice to give birth naturally, Dr. T'Ana surgically intervenes... by stuffing a boot in Rutherford's mouth for him to bite into to deal with the pain as she lasers his abdomen open to pull the baby alien out, then closes it up again, all without anesthetic.

• There have been several instances of pregnant women being kidnapped and having their unborn children forcibly taken from their wombs, generally by women who've been faking their pregnancy and now need "proof" in the form of a newborn. A list of ten such cases in the US appears here.
  • A tragic case was the murders of Marlen Ochoa-Lopez and her son Yovanny at the hands of Clarisa Figueroa, who was motivated by the recent death of her own child. Marlen was lured under the pretense of free baby clothes and was killed and thrown in a dumpster. Yovanny did not survive being ripped from his mother.
  • Tiffany Hall not only murdered a pregnant mother and her unborn child in a failed attempt at this, but she also murdered the victim's other three children out of sadism. She was sentenced to death.
• Sadly, this often occurred as a war crime in the past, with recorded incidents from the Indian Rebellion in 1857 to the Rape of Nanking in the 1930s, the Nazi concentration camps (where pregnant women would also be experimented on), and the mass murders of Orthodox Serbs in the Jasenovac camp (by the Nazi-backed Catholic Croatian fascist Ustaše during World War II).
• A shocking but simultaneously fascinating example from an aquarium in New Zealand: A SHARK was subjected to this trope by another shark. Apparently, no one knew the first shark was pregnant until the second one bit her and ripped her open. To everyone's astonishment, a few baby sharks swam out of their mother's wound and the aquarium staff immediately worked to rescue them and their mother, successfully getting the remaining babies out (there were eight in total) and patching up the mother's injuries, from which she has since recovered (this is a rare case of this trope having a happy ending). Inevitably, this led to many jokes about sea-sections and nurse sharks.
• There's an extremely graphic video on YouTube of a Komodo dragon eating a pregnant deer alive. Eventually, the lizard tears into the doe's abdominal cavity and pulls out its unborn fawn, swallowing it whole, and then resumes eating the mother (which still isn't dead yet).