Afghan Woman Gives Birth on US Evacuation Plane

One Afghan mom has quite a birth story to tell. A pregnant woman who had been evacuated from Afghanistan to what the military called an “intermediate staging base in the Middle East,” then flown to Ramstein Air Base in Germany went into labor on a US Air Force C-17, the Washington Post reports. She experienced complications, although it’s not clear what they were. The pilot tried dropping the altitude, which helped. Upon landing, medics rushed aboard and delivered her baby in the cargo bay.

Mom and baby are doing fine, and were taking to a nearby medical facility, the Air Mobility Command said in a tweet. The two are among the lucky 17,000 or so who have been evacuated from Afghanistan, the BBC reports. Thousands of people are crowded around the airport in Kabul, with as many as 60,000 people hoping to be airlifted out. Thousands more are living in tents at the Ramstein base. Flights paused for a few hours on Friday as staging areas hit capacity, but resumed later that same day. (More Afghanistan stories.)