Traumatic C-Section

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Pretty much all C-sections were traumatic before the 1880s. Incidentally, Julius Caesar was not actually born this way, though Pliny says one of his ancestors was.

"Hey, look! A womb with a view!" —Rich, Cannibal Campout

Simply put, a Traumatic C-Section is when a pregnant woman has her unborn child crudely ripped or cut from her body. If done well (being prone to Special Effects Failure) it can result in Grade A Nausea Fuel.

Contrast with Chest Burster, for when the offspring (or the equivalent of it) just violently comes out on its own, with no outside "assistance".

Often goes hand in hand with Eats Babies, for some reason.

Examples of Traumatic C-Section include:

Comic Books

• 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.

Fan Works

• In the Comics Nix X-Men fanfic Day of Reckoning, Cyclops mutilates Jean Grey and her fetus falls out.

Film

• 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.
• Automaton Transfusion re-creates the above scene almost exactly, but with a zombie.
• 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.
• The French film À l'intérieur ("Inside") centers on an insane woman who wants to cut out the main character's baby, intent on having it replace her own dead child.
• During the making of the original Dawn of the Dead, a pregnant extra suggested 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.
• In the otherwise forgettable made-for-TV movie Scarlett, one scene features Scarlett O'Hara going through this.
• During a test screening of the My Bloody Valentine remake, 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.
• The first Violent Shit ends with a pregnant Karl ripping himself open to let the baby out.
• In Felidae, a dead cat is found ripped open and surrounded by fetuses.
• Old footage found by the characters in Xtro: Watch the Skies shows an alien's young being ripped out of the parent while she(?) is in the middle of being vivisected.
• In The Mutilator a character mentions his father once caught a shark and slit it open, causing roughly a dozen or so baby sharks to messily spill out.
• A Japanese soldier cuts a Chinese civilian's baby out with his bayonet in Black Sun: The Nanking Massacre.
• Forever Evil has a random Dream Sequence where an undead woman pulls out her demonic baby.
• The fetus ripping from Troma's Terror Firmer.
• A fetus is cut out and devoured in Cannibal Campout ("Smells like a girl... tastes like a girl").
• Slow Torture Puke Chamber has a fetus being cut out, raped, dismembered, liquefied, puked on and drank.
• This is actually one of the least fucked up things to occur in the August Underground trilogy.
• Seeing as how it's an abortion-themed horror film, Hanger of course features this.
• The Shivers, one of Todd Sheets's many obscure little films, has a pregnant woman de-fetus herself due to the evil's influence.
• In a Better World, for a non-horror or exploitation film example.
• At the end of one of the Carnosaurs, 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.
• Seeing this happen to its mate is what sends the killer whale in Orca the Killer Whale on its Roaring Rampage of Revenge.

Literature

• 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.

• Is mentioned in The Bible, specifically in the prophetic books of the Old Testament, where Israel has descended into idolatry and corruption, and is involved with conflicts involving other nations as well as its own civil war. The Assyrians (one of the most brutal and most effective armies of the ancient Middle East) are mentioned as doing this among other practices that would be considered war crimes today.
• In the fourth Twilight novel, 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.
• Fetuses in The Time Traveler's Wife time travel out of the womb on several occasions. This is extremely messy and disturbing.
• A much milder example, in which the victim is a salmon, is mentioned in the Discworld novel Unseen Academicals. Still, it's only brought up for just how disturbing it was to see all those cute little otter cubs eating all those little salmon eggs...
• One of the tortures inflicted upon the female mutant in Apeshit.
• A mad scientist may or may not have done this to one of his test subjects in Jason X: Death Moon.

Live-Action TV

• In an episode of Law and Order SVU, the Victim of the Week was a woman who was killed when her husband cut her baby out, convinced that she was having an affair and that the child wasn't his. It was.
• I, Claudius had Caligula impregnate his sister, then cut her open and eat the baby.
• This is implied to have happened to Ilithyia in Spartacus: Vengeance.
• Happened to Violet in Private Practice. A patient was convinced the baby was hers.

Podcast

• Metamor City: this happens to Abbey Preston, by 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.

Web Comics

• Kane threatens to do this to Wendy in a Jack arc, as seen here.

Western Animation

• This bit from The Simpsons version of The Nativity Story.

Doctor Nick: "Good news everybody, Caeser just invented the Caesarean!" (whips out a large saw) Marge/Mary: "Get him out of here!"

Real Life

• References to this practice in The Bible (mentioned above) are very much based on real-life Assyrian and Babylonian practice in war. There are poems dating back to 1100 BC boasting about the deeds of the mighty conqueror Tilgat-Pileser I, which included utterly destroying defeated peoples, down to their unborn children.
• Before the sixteenth century Casesarean sections had a very high mortality rate, though in many cases the mother was already dead.
• There's been numerous instances of this occurring in real life, with mentally unstable women usually being the perpetrators. Such cases likely inspired the aforementioned film Inside.
• This was done to one of the victims of the Dnepropetrovsk Maniacs (the people responsible for "3guys1hammer").
• The film section of this page references Black Sun: The Nanking Massacre, where a Japanese soldier uses a bayonet to rip an unborn fetus from a civilian woman's stomach. Unfortunately, this was based on an actual accounts by survivors of the siege.