Father Buys His Daughter An Antique Chair, 2 Years Later She Finds Out It’s Actually A Birthing Chair

Oh boy, here comes the dad. Remember the time when one dad accidentally bought a life-sized dinosaur—6 meters long, for those asking—for his 4-year-old son? There’s something about this cocktail of chance, a dad, and a credit card that makes it Everything nice! Except that we’re not dealing with the Powerpuff Girls here, but the real outcome of dad coming back from a random shopping spree.

This time, one Mexican dad decided to get his daughter a desk chair. Spoiled kids never appreciate parents’ effort and naturally the chair was dubbed ‘uncomfortable.’ After further investigation, the daughter was blown away: “it’s a birthing chair from the 19th century!” And guess what? There are a couple more very familiar-looking chairs in that house…

See how this surprising discovery unfolded below.

The Mexican girl in her mid-20s shared the incident with Imgur users

So, what is this mysterious object? Apparently, long before delivery rooms and fetal monitoring technology, wooden chairs like that were a common practice in the 18th and 19th centuries.

Anneliese Braunegg from Case Western Reserve University writes that “the primary birthing method shifted from use of the birthing chair to use of the birthing bed because it is the most convenient position for the doctor, as it allows him to view the baby more easily and use a device that midwives have not used.”

The birthing chair might appear rather suspicious to our modern eye, but research shows that the use of a birthing chair doesn’t increase the health risk to either the mom, nor the baby, and therefore represents an appropriate alternative to the traditional use of the birthing bed. The question is how many women would be willing to opt for such a quirky object to deliver a baby.