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What they are not saying in this article is why this procedure is dangerous to mom...

The baby's head is punctured thru the neck... the neck of the baby is in the mom's uterine cervix (like the lips of a bottle). The cervix is very very soft and easily torn. So the scissors can more easily go thru the soft cervix than thru the baby's bony neck and skull.

A torn cervix can lead to hemorrhage and if sewn up and fixed properly, mom will miscarry every pregnancy she later tries to have. This is called "incompetent cervix".

And, of course, if the scissors don't slip sideways but accidentally slip parallel to the baby's head, you will end up with perforating the peritoneal cavity, causing hemorrhage, and death.

This procedure dates back to days when women with rickets would die in childbirth, so they would do this to save her life, since the kids' head would not fit thru her bony pelvis, (the hole in her pelvis would be deformed and small from ricketts)...but it became obsolete by the time that anesthesia and asepsis made Caesarian sections safer, about the turn of the century.

If you remember the movie "the Cardinal", they were given the choice between the mom and the baby. If a woman had been in prolonged labor, there was danger of infection and death of the mother from infection/dehydration in a Caesarian section, so they still did this to "save the mother"...and of course, Catholic doctors were not allowed into many OB/Gyn training programs because they would refuse to do it.

But even this reason became obsolete after WWI, when IV fluids became recognized and "extra peritoneal caesarian section" technique was devised. And once Penicillin was available, it became unknown to do such a dangerous procedure.

BTW: When we worked in Africa, where a lady might be divorced if she had a caesarian section, we didn't do this procedure, we did a symphysiotomy to open the pelvic bones for delivery.