5 of the Worst Places to Give Birth

Lots of campers pack baby wipes to get through the five-day Glastonbury music festival, but few will actually use them on a new-born baby. Heidi Wesson, though, might have the chance: the 33-year-old festival-goer delivered a daughter at an on-site medical center just after the Rolling Stones’ set. Glastonbury is not exactly known for its hygiene—the BBC recommends you “stuff loo roll up your nose before you open the door” to the Porta Potties—but neither is it the least hygienic, or the weirdest, place anyone’s ever given birth. Here are five other contenders.

A McDonald’s bathroom: It’s the horror story that haunts young women everywhere. Sixteen-year-old McDonald’s employee Danielle Miller didn’t even realize she was pregnant—she went to the bathroom with stomach cramps and came out a mother.

An art gallery: Performance artist Marni Kotak made headlines in 2011 when she decided to give birth at the Microscope Gallery in Brooklyn in front of 20 lucky friends, family and some particularly… art-loving strangers. For Kotak, who calls giving birth “the highest form of art”, the delivery of her son was just the first of hundreds of installments in her 18-year magnum opus, “Raising Baby X.”

30,000 feet in the air: Aida Alamillo was flying from the Philippines to San Francisco when she went into early labor with her fourth child. Delivering without a doctor or anesthesia wasn’t the only complication of Alamillo’s unusual birth, though: Whether her son should be granted Filipino or American citizenship became the subject of an international debate.

At your own wedding: Your wedding day is really supposed to be about two people, but for one French bride, it became more of a three-person affair when she gave birth just minutes after exchanging vows at her town hall wedding. I guess you take some risks when you plan your wedding for the week before your due date.

In front of a webcam: Self-proclaimed “birth coach” Nancy Salgueiro is on a mission to help you achieve a natural (hopefully orgasmic) childbirth. In 2011, she took her lesson to the masses, setting up a high-definition video camera in her living room to live-stream the birth of her son. About 2,000 voyeurs… I mean viewers tuned in.

As Mike Tyson said, “Everybody has a plan until they get punched in the face.” Or head-butted in the uterus.