Way to go, clump of cells!

Charité Hospital in Berlin announced on Tuesday that they have taken the world’s first magnetic resonance imaging pictures of a human baby being born, Germany’s The Local reports.

The hospital used a specially built “open” MRI scanner — unlike the typical tube-shaped MRI machines — to take images of the baby as it moved through the mother’s birth canal to the point where its head emerged. The scanner is also designed so it can monitor the baby’s heartbeat throughout the birth.

Charité gynaecologist Ernst Beinder said “We can now see all the details we previously could only study with probes. These images are fascinating and proved yet again that every birth is a small miracle,’ London’s Daily Mail reports.

I’d say every life is a small miracle, but why quibble?

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Véronique adds: For some reason, I have a mental image of me getting to the hospital in labour and the eager researchers going: “We have this great machine we’re going to hook you up to… if you will sign here…” All joking aside, there is still a lot we don’t know about the ways in which babies are not passive participant in the birth process. My second child was a breech birth – back in the days when it was not an automatic c-section – and a nurse whose shift had ended a couple of hours earlier asked if she could stay for the birth. She said that breech births were fascinating because you could see the baby work himself out of the birth canal.