Women are so fucking cool, I want to cry

In the 1700s there was a woman named Mary Toft who was a servant in England. She was 24, and without doing too much research, from what I can gather it seems she and her husband were poor and without children. One doctor in the neighborhood, Nathaniel St Andre, was so obsessed with the idea of rabbits giving birth to human babies (as demonstrated in certain medical textbooks of the time) that he convinced Mary he could make it happen if she just gave birth to some rabbits. And she did. <br><br>She gave birth to 9 rabbits, if you can imagine. I can’t. It’s not as if she birthed them fully formed, alive, and hopping, but even the dead rabbit parts seem like an unspeakable act. She got them from a market. <br><br>This sounds so disgusting, but it’s also just so funny. Doctor St Andre was so convinced that he even got other doctors to verify that the births were authentic. I can’t imagine being the-doctors-in-the-delivery-room and watching a poor young woman shoving various dead animal parts out of her vagina, into a bucket. There’s just so much about this that’s insane. <br><br>But Mary Toft stuck with the bit. And she didn’t just birth any old rabbits, she was selective. She gave birth to a few at a time, she gave birth to parts of rabbits, and at one point she gave birth to a half cat. Eventually she was caught pinching herself and screaming in pain as she tried to birth the last of the rabbits, and she was forced to confess. <br><br>This story haunts me. I can’t stop thinking about it and I want to cry over how sad it is.