Born from a Dead Woman

Tell thee, Macduff was from his mother’s womb Untimely ripp’d.

— Macbeth, Act V Scene VIII

A woman gives birth to a live baby minutes, hours, or even days after her own death. Depending on the child, they may be seen as a miracle, Born Unlucky, cursed, or anywhere in between.

Also counts for cases where the mother was undead at the time of the birth, which can result in an Undead Child. Cases where the mother is brain-dead but kept alive by life support can also count.

Despite the fantastic sounding concept, this has been known to happen in real life. Studies have shown that if the amniotic sac is intact, a fetus can survive the death of the mother for a short period of time.

Accounts of this phenomenon go back centuries, where they were referred to as "coffin births", though only more recent cases are documented well enough to be considered real. Many historical cases are thought to be the result of the woman being Buried Alive back when it was more difficult to determine whether someone was really dead. The official term is post-mortem fetal extrusion.

Compare Death by Childbirth, which usually occurs after the delivery. A Traumatic C-Section may or may not be fatal to the mother, but prior to modern medicine, it was usually performed when the mother had already died in an attempt to save the baby. A subtrope of Missing Mom, as well as Birth-Death Juxtaposition. May occur as a result of Imperiled in Pregnancy.

Contrast with Tragic Stillbirth and Convenient Miscarriage, where it's the child who dies prior to the birth and the mother (usually) lives.

As a Death Trope all spoilers will be unmarked.

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Examples

Anime and Manga

• Attack on Titan: Before the Fall: Kuklo was extracted from his mother's body after she had been devoured and regurgitated by a Titan. This made him into an oddity, a freak to be put on display, until he escaped and found his way to the Survey Corps.
• In Berserk, Guts was found under the corpse of his hanged mother, umbilical cord still attached. It goes to show how the world has had it out for him since before he was even born, but he survives regardless. His case seems to be inspired by a real account of a woman giving birth after being hanged by The Spanish Inquisition. In The Golden Age Arc trilogy, the first verse of "Blood and Guts" describes the nature of Guts' birth.
  Robbed of a mother's love at birth
  Left to drown in blood
  He was to die beneath her corpse
  And to rot in a cesspit of despair
  Born to die as a waste of air
• Implied to be the case in Claymore with the being that emerges from Riful's corpse after she's killed. She immediately attacks her mother's killer, Priscilla, using what seems to be a combination of Riful's and her probable father Dauf's powers.
• GeGeGe no Kitarō's titular character was still healthy and in his mother's womb at the time of her death, but it took until she and her husband were as good as buried in the ground for Kitaro to finally be born.
• In Ghost in the Shell: Arise, this version of Motoko Kusanagi had her brain rescued from her pregnant mother's body after she was killed in an accident. It was then put in a cyborg body, and consequently her brain is the only organic part of her.
• In Ode to Kirihito, Kirihito, Reiko, and Murakami discover the body of a woman with a Pretty Little Headshot and a still-living baby between her legs, still attached by the umbilical cord. Kirihito states that the shock of being shot caused the woman to give birth after her death. The starved baby dies shortly afterwards despite Kirihito's efforts to save it.
• In +Anima, Cooro was found in a church by a group of nuns after falling from his deceased mother's body as she was being eaten by crows. The trauma of this event gave him his powers.
• Shido in Zombie Loan is eventually revealed to have been born after his mother became a zombie. Even odder, she was pregnant for seven years.

Comics

• In the Charmed (1998) season 9 comics, Paige witnesses a young, heavily pregnant woman get shot, and is too late to save her because Healing Hands don't work on the dead, so she resorts to directly teleporting the baby out of the womb. Paige and her husband end up adopting the baby themselves.
• In The X-Men, Vulcan's mother Katherine Summers was murdered while he was still in the womb; he was subsequently cut out of her body and kept alive by Shi'ar scientists to be raised as a slave.

Films — Live-Action

• In the film universe, Blade was born soon after his mother was killed and turned by a vampire, turning him into a Dhampyr.
• Dawn of the Dead (2004) has a Zombie Infectee who is a heavily-pregnant woman, who ends up succumbing to the disease and is forced to be executed as a form of Mercy Kill. Seconds after her death, she gave birth to a little zombie girl who continues attacking the main characters.
• Pacific Rim: Several hours after the Kaiju Otachi is killed, it turns out to have been pregnant and an infant kaiju emerges from its mother's corpse. It's born premature and quickly suffocates, but it's no less vicious than any other kaiju for the minutes that it's alive.
• The first segment of the 2018 anthology melodrama Life Itself sees Abby struck by a bus and killed while pregnant; her unborn daughter Dylan survives and is subsequently raised by her grandfather in the second segment, as her father suffered a breakdown and was institutionalized after Abby's death.

Literature

• In Avesta of Black and White, the novel opens with a pregnant woman committing suicide by jumping off a cliff because she knows the child she is carrying will grow into an Archdemon. Unfortunately it doesn't work due to the child possessing Complete Immortality, and the unborn child psychically thanks her for being her first murder seconds before impact. The child later crawls out of her lifeless body and becomes the Archdemon Frederica.
• Jaxom in Dragonriders of Pern is born "premature and taken forcibly from the dead dame's belly". She wasn't dead long, though, as it was the attempt at childbirth that killed her. Still, the baby's survival came as a surprise to at least some characters.
• Miracle McCoy from Dancing on the Edge got her name because she was born after her mother was hit by an ambulance.
• Gleams of Aeterna: When Queen Catherine is stabbed by a jealous admirer in the eighth month of her pregnancy, she bleeds out before the doctors can do anything, but they manage to save her son.
• Kane Series: In her Back Story Rehhaile from "Cold Light" was "torn out of her dead mother's womb" by a physician after the woman had succumbed to The Plague. Possibly because of the circumstances surrounding her birth, Rehhaile is blind but can connect to other people's minds to look through their eyes.
• Morella: The daughter of Morella and the narrator "breathed not until the mother breathed no more".
• The Mortal Instruments: The heavily pregnant Céline Herondale committed suicide upon hearing her husband, Stephen's death. Valentine Morgenstern cut her womb and found the baby, Jace, alive.
• At the very beginning of Sabriel, the Abhorsen Terciel arrives at a camp and finds a group of travelers that tried to help his pregnant wife after she went into labor, but both she and her child died. Terciel then goes into Death and is able to retrieve the baby's soul and bring her back to life, but her mother was already too far gone.
• Played with in "The Breathing Method", by Stephen King. A woman goes into labour, but suffers a car crash on her way to the hospital and is decapitated. When the doctor arrives at the accident site, he discovers that she is inexplicably alive, and her body is still working to give birth to the baby. After the infant is delivered, the woman's head whispers "Thank you" to the doctor, as she peacefully passes away.
• Yaksha in The Last Vampire series was born after his pregnant mother had died and her corpse was possessed by a demon (and then slain again). He ended up becoming the progenitor of the vampire race because of the demonic influence on him as an unborn fetus.
• In Toni Morrison's Song of Solomon, Pilate and Macon Dead II's mother Sing dies moments before Pilate comes out of the womb.

Live-Action TV

• Angel: After briefly being brought back to life as a mortal human then turned into a vampire again, Darla becomes pregnant from sex with Angel (also a vampire but with a soul). By the time the baby is due she's being affected by its soul and feeling compassion, empathy, etc and is terrified of what she might do (to her own child) after giving birth and losing these traits. But as a vampire, her undead body is incapable of giving birth and the labor continues until the child itself is in danger. She ultimately sacrifices herself, staking herself in the heart and causing her body to turn to dust, so that her child can be born.
• Call the Midwife: A first-time mother whose only pregnancy complication has been feuding grandmothers is abruptly killed in a car crash and Doctor Turner is forced to perform an emergency c-section in the middle of the road. Mrs. Turner talks the poor woman through the procedure as if she were still alive as the only form of Due to the Dead she can give her patient.
• Doc Robbins on CSI once realized that a teenage girl who'd hanged herself just minutes before he and Nick arrived on-scene still had a living fetus inside her, so he hastily performed a c-section and was able to save the baby.
• CSI: NY: In "The Box," an unwed pregnant woman promises her baby to a couple, then changes her mind in her last month. She gets pushed down the stairs during a fight in their home. The husband realizes she's dead, but cuts the baby out of her and hides her body.
• On Rizzoli & Isles, Maura had to perform a caesarean on a heavily-pregnant woman who'd been fatally stabbed mere moments earlier, while Jane gave the already-dead woman CPR to keep blood moving long enough for the baby to be saved.
• Scream Queens (2015): The killers' origin story. Their mother gave birth in a bathtub, then suddenly died, and the second twin was born at the moment of the mother's death.
• In the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode "Galaxy's Child", our heroes are attacked by a Space Whale. They try to dissuade it with minimal powered phasers, but even this is enough to kill it. Then they discover that the creature was pregnant, so they have to cut it open to free the infant.
• Veronica Mars: In Season 2, Meg Manning was pregnant when she went into a coma after the bus crash. She dies of a sudden brain aneurysm, but doctors were able to save the baby.

Music

• In the video to Travis Tritt's "Tell Me I Was Dreaming," the narrator's heavily pregnant wife suffers a fall. The resulting head injury proves fatal for her, but doctors then delivered her baby alive.

Myths and Legends

• Tradition says this was the case with Saint Raymond Nonnatus, who was delivered by c-section after the death of his mother. "Nonnatus" literally means "unborn."
• The Greek god Asclepius is said to have been delivered by Caesarean section after his mother Coronis was killed on Mt. Olympus.
• Similarly Dionysus's human mother Semele died after Hera tricked her into making Zeus reveal his true form, which burned her down to ash. But because the fetus was immortal, Zeus took it and sewed it into his thigh to bring it to term.
• Furbaide Ferbend from the Ulster Cycle of Celtic Mythology was born by posthumous c-section after his mother was murdered by her conniving sister Queen Medb. Furbaide eventually got even with Medb by assassinating her by propelling a piece of cheese he was eating at her by his sling for one helluva Undignified Death.
• The Japanese story of the child-raising ghost: a dead woman gives birth in her coffin, and her ghost makes nightly visits to a store near the graveyard to buy candy until the curious storekeeper follows her and unburies her healthy child.

Tabletop Games

• Dungeons & Dragons: Half-Undead are most commonly born to mothers who were transformed into undead during pregnancy, though for obvious reasons it's rare for the fetus to survive the process. This puts them in a Mortality Grey Area with a combination of living and undead traits.

Theater

• Macduff, from Shakespeare's Macbeth, revealed that he was not literally born but removed from his dead mother, completing the Prophecy Twist of No Man of Woman Born.

Video Games

• Played for Cosmic Horror in Bloodborne: The Orphan of Kos is a Humanoid Abomination born from the remains of the Eldritch Abomination named Kos (or some say, "Kosm") after she beached herself ashore near the Fishing Hamlet. It is not clear whether a being like Kos can really be dead, or whether the Orphan was ever physically born since you only encounter both of them in the Dream Land... but it is also quite clear that such categories hardly apply to the Great Ones.
• Death Stranding: Zig-zagged. The Bridge Babies (or BBs) are fetuses removed in the seventh month of pregnancy from their brain-dead parent (called "stillmothers") to be put in pods that stunt their growth, so that they can be used as BT detectors. The stillmother is still kept alive with the use of machinery in the medical ward of one of the Knot Cities, but they're pretty much beyond saving by now and there's no chance that they will ever wake up. The BB needs to be synced with its stillmother from time to time, to keep up the illusion that it's still actually inside the womb, otherwise, it will malfunction. Taking the BB out of its pod is illegal and there's a high chance that it will result in its death. However, there are at least two known examples of a BB surviving the procedure and one of them growing into a healthy adult.
• Dragalia Lost: Pinon was born in such a way. Her parents die on a mission while she was in her mother, and Gabriel senses her within and forms a sigil with her to ensure her birth. After that, Gabriel raised the newly-born apostle herself.
• F.E.A.R.: Alma rapes Becket, gets pregnant, and successfully gives birth, all after her own death. She was a very powerful psychic in life and has manifested as an equally powerful ghost.

Webcomics

• Dark Wings: Albino wyvern Sleet was cut from the body of his mother after she was fatally wounded by villagers for her markings that outed her as a member of The Empire.

Real Life

• Pope Gregory XIV was delivered by post-mortem hysterectomy.
• Despite a popular story saying so, this was not actually how Julius Caesar was born. It's theorized one of his ancestors may have been and was the source of the name, but he himself was born normally and his mother lived well into her 60s.
• In 2007, a 23-year-old woman who was at over eight months pregnant hanged herself shortly after contractions began. The baby survived.
• There have been several cases of pregnant women on life support who delivered children, as seen here.
• The gruesome phenomenon of coffin birth—when a dead pregnant body decomposes, the tissues in the vagina and cervix putrefy and weaken, and the buildup of gases in the abdomen eventually expels the content of the uterus out. This is extremely rare now since most bodies are embalmed and don't decompose normally, but it's exactly what happened to the 8 months pregnant Laci Peterson when she was dumped into the San Francisco Bay, explaining why her body and that of her unborn son Connor were found separately and why Connor's body was considerably less decomposed since he had been protected from the elements by being inside Laci (leading to initial speculation that he may have been born alive until later tests proved this wasn't the case).

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