Baby Born On Airplane Worked Out Perfectly For The Mom And Baby: And I Imagine Not Great For Everybody Else
Last month, Dr. Sij Hemal was settling in to a trans-Atlantic flight on Air France. He'd just attended his best friend's wedding in New Delhi, India and was beginning the Paris-to-New York leg of his day-long journey home. Hemal, a second-year urology resident at Cleveland Clinic's Glickman Urological and Kidney Institute, was seated next to a French pediatrician – by total coincidence – and was watching a movie and awaiting a glass of champagne.
"I was pretty tired from jet lag," Dr. Hemal recalled in a post on Cleveland Clinic's website. "I thought I'd just have a drink and fall asleep. As it turned out, I'm glad I didn't drink anything."
It's safe to say fellow passenger Toyin Ogundipe, a 41-year-old banker who resides in both the U.K. and Nigeria, feels the same way. She went into labor midway into the flight.
The plane was passing the southern coast of Greenland at the time, and making an emergency landing would require a two-hour diversion to a U.S. military base in the Azores Islands. Hemal volunteered to assist Ogundipe and recommended the pilot stay the course to JFK International Airport, still a few hours away.
He and the pediatrician, Dr. Susan Shepherd, suggested moving Ogundipe up to the first class section where there was more room and fewer passengers. "My ticket to first class!" he quipped.
Thirty minutes of pushing later, she gave birth to a little boy whom she named Jake.
Full story here.
I guess if you’re going to give birth on an airplane you might as well give birth next to a medical student and a pediatrician. This checks every baby delivery box I’ve proposed when it comes to non-hospital births: we’ve got some experienced folks on hand, and best of all, mom’s getting coddled in first class. These doctors are so cocky they decide to keep the plane in the air! No need to land! We’ll do this thing live!
It must kind of suck to be a first class passenger on this flight though, right? Like you’ve paid an arm and a leg to have some relative peace and quiet on a cross-Atlantic flight and someone from business class goes into fucking labor? That seems A WHOLE LOT like a business class problem. I’ve never been present for a childbirth, but I imagine it’s loud, smelly, and frankly, tough to look at. You think a baby crying is bad? Imagine a baby being shat out at light speed by a screaming mother. Right, that sounds worse. All of these people should get their tickets refunded. There’s very little difference between witnessing childbirth in first class and witnessing childbirth in a cattle car. Yeah yeah it’s a miracle I get it, but it’s not worth first class money.
