Viral videos tend to be hilarious, heartwarming, and if we're lucky? Both.
But sometimes a video is shared and viewed over and over again simply because it's too fascinating — or jaw-dropping — to look away.
Cue this video, originally uploaded on July 18, 2015 to YouTube by user i8thacookies — who seems to also be the father of the child and the husband of the woman giving birth.
Titled "Woman gives birth to 10lb baby in car," the four-minute clip shows just that: a pregnant women in the passenger seat of a car, screaming in pain from contractions, while her husband, driving the car, films the unfolding event from his seat.
Two minutes into the video, while the car is still on what appears to be a highway, she gives birth to a baby boy.
The YouTube clip has nearly 28 million views, but it went viral again after a shorter version of the video was ripped to Facebook on December 1. Now another 22 million people have seen the clip, totaling 50 million views across the two platforms. Who knows where it'll go from here!
Warning: the video contains no nudity, but might be considered graphic to some. It's also a pretty loud video, so pop your earbuds in if you're at the office.
After announcing "it's coming out," her husband, still filming, helps her unbuckle her seatbelt and get her pants down (this is where we kind of thought, hmmm, what?). He also continues to drive. There are many moving elements to this very dramatic scene.
Then, you hear her scream a bunch. You hear "oh my gosh, it's coming out," and then basically, you hear the baby cry and she lifts hew new baby boy up.
The car is still moving.
"High-five babe!" the new dad exclaims. The woman gives him a high-five with the back of her hand, because she has vernix (the white stuff all over the baby) on the palm of her hand. Thoughtful!
Right before the video ends, the man says: "So I wonder if we still have to pay for using the birth center."
This is insane — and adding to the insanity is the fact that it was both filmed and uploaded for the world to see. The YouTube version seems to have been uploaded by the father/ driver/cameraman. In a comment below the video, he gave some detail:
By the way, the comment about wondering if we still had to pay for the birth center was just a joke. They still gave us lots of medical care, we still used their facilities including for delivering the placenta. The name of the birth center is Bay Area Birth Center in Pasadena, and we highly recommend them. We have 2 girls, 1 and 2 years old, and they were both born there.
We reached out to this person and we haven't heard back. Back in July, when the video first went up on YouTube, the account was inundated with requests from local and national media to use the video.
Here are some comments on i8thacookies' account underneath the upload, though it doesn't seem he responded to any of their inquiries via YouTube.
The Facebook version, uploaded two days ago by a French athlete named Renaud Margry provided no context, but it's not hard to find the original by Googling "baby born in car."
Unplanned, spontaneous births are nothing new — this woman gave birth in the backseat of a cab, while another went into labor on the subway before giving birth on a Brooklyn sidewalk. But what is new is filming the process of it and sharing it with the entire internet. And this couple isn't the first — a quick YouTube search will produce several other instances of these videos uploaded online.
You can watch the full video below, but again: use earbuds.
