Teenager Delivers Baby's Decapitated Head, Body Stayed In Womb For 24 Hours

A teenage mother expressed her trauma after she gave birth to the decapitated head of her baby while the rest of the newborn's body remained trapped inside her for 24 hours. The incident took place in Boksburg, South Africa.

In a recent interview, Kagiso Kgatla, 19, said she was suing the Tambo Memorial Hospital and its doctors for negligence. The teenager said she underwent labor while she was six months pregnant. Doctors had told her the child might be born with some abnormalities but she was prepared to care for her baby.

However, she was left horrified and traumatized as she delivered her baby boy’s severed head during labor.

“A doctor came and said I should push. I pushed and pushed. Nothing," she told local TV station ENCA about the traumatic birth. “He inserted his hands and said I should try again but still there was nothing... He also said he could see the baby’s head. Then he asked for those big spoons."

“That’s when my baby’s head came out, but only the head. The body remained inside,” she added.

While Kgatla blamed the doctors for the death of her child, hospital officials reportedly insisted they told the mother that her baby had only a “very small chance” of living.

“Normally, when the head is not crowning we assist. We call it assisted delivery," the hospital's head of obstetrics, Dr. Gilbert Anyetei, said. “In this particular instance the head popped out on its own and we tried to see if the rest of the body would follow, but the rest of the body didn't follow.”

The local health department is now investigating the case to determine what went wrong during the birth.

In a similar incident in the United Kingdom, a doctor decapitated a baby during delivery at Ninewells Hospital in Dundee.

Vaishnavy Vilvanathan Laxman, a consultant gynecologist, decapitated an unborn baby while carrying out a normal delivery of a 30-year-old patient. The delivery was conducted when she failed to perform an emergency cesarean section.

A medical practitioners' tribunal service in Manchester, England, said in June that Laxman forced the patient to push out her baby the normal way even though she knew the baby was in feet-first position with a prolapsed cord and low heart rate. The panel determined this was a grave error in judgment on the doctor’s part.

In another case in Pakistan, a female doctor accidentally decapitated a baby during delivery, leaving the body of the child inside the mother's womb. The incident took place at a private clinic in the city of Quetta, 600 miles southwest of capital Islamabad.