When a woman dies during labour before the child is born, it is considered imperative to try to deliver it, if there is a chance it may still be alive, if only to allow it to be baptised. Catholic theologians stress the importance of saving the soul of the unborn child so that it is not condemned to Purgatory, an idea which is echoed by various authors of medical treatises in the late XVIth and early XVIIth centuries.

Caesarean sections on living women are highly controversial, but the procedure is regularly accepted after the mother's death, as we can see from illustrations even at the very start of the XVIth century and right through to the XVIIth century.

After the death of a woman where no pregnancy is suspected, an autopsy may yield a surprising outcome, as Simon de Provanchières relates with his tale of a calcified foetus which was delivered during an autopsy some twenty-eight years after the original aborted labour. While autopsies (often using the bodies of executed criminals) are performed within Faculties of Medicine to demonstrate anatomy to physicians, cadavers of preganant women are rarely used, since the law requires convicted pregnant women to give birth before execution. However, Riolan records a case in which a pregnancy has not been detected, and so his autopsy reveals a foetus of five months.