what is the origin of the word cesarean
Caesarean section The Roman Lex Regia (royal law), later the Lex Caesarea (imperial law), of Numa Pompilius (715â€“673 BC),[109] required the child of a mother dead in childbirth to be cut from her womb.[110] There was a cultural taboo that mothers not be buried pregnant,[111] that may have reflected a way of saving some fetuses. Roman practice requiring a living mother to be in her tenth month of pregnancy before resorting to the procedure, reflecting the knowledge that she could not survive the delivery.[112] Speculation that the Roman dictator Julius Caesar was born by the method now known as C-section is apparently false.[113] Although Caesarean sections were performed in Roman times, no classical source records a mother surviving such a delivery.[110][114] As late as the 12th century, scholar and physician Maimonides expresses doubt over the possibility of a woman's surviving this procedure and again falling pregnant.[115] The term has also been explained as deriving from the verb caedere, "to cut", with children delivered this way referred to as caesones. Pliny the Elder refers to a certain Julius Caesar (an ancestor of the famous Roman statesman) as ab utero caeso, "cut from the womb" giving this as an explanation for the cognomen "Caesar" which was then carried by his descendants.[110] Nonetheless, even if the etymological hypothesis linking the caesarean section to Julius Caesar is a false etymology, it has been widely believed. For example, the Oxford English Dictionary defines Caesarean birth as "the delivery of a child by cutting through the walls of the abdomen when delivery cannot take place in the natural way, as was done in the case of Julius Caesar".[116] Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary (11th edition) leaves room for etymological uncertainty with the phrase, "from the legendary association of such a delivery with the Roman cognomen Caesar"[117]