This unfinished painting, Frida and the Cesarean by Frida Kahlo is a horrifying depiction of one of Frida’s greatest sorrows (of which there are many) – the fact that she could not bear children.

When Frida was eighteen years old she was involved in a bus accident that broke her ribs, legs, foot, spinal column, and collarbone and impaled her pelvic bone and uterus. The medical repercussions of the accident lasted the rest of her life, one of the main ones being an inability to carry a pregnancy to term. This was one of Kahlo’s most painful realities, along with the fact that her husband, Diego Rivera, seemed to have a physical incapability of keeping it in his pants. She was quoted saying, “There have been two great accidents in my life. One was the trolley, and the other was Diego. Diego was by far the worst.” Regardless of their order of awfulness, both of these unfortunate circumstances became themes in her artwork, as you can see in her paintings, Henry Ford Hospital, A Few Small Nips, and Without Hope.

This piece shows Kahlo on a bed alongside a healthy baby, and the floating head of what appears to be the father, Diego. You can tell because of his bulging eyes, receding hairline, and double chin. There are a group of doctors in the back performing what we are assuming is the Cesarean in question. Of course this scene was never going to materialize in real life. Frida painted it because she was mourning the fact that she was never going to be able to have children of her own. Her body was simply not healthy enough to handle that kind of long-term stress and as a result she had several abortions and miscarriages throughout her life, all of which proved to be life-threatening and incredibly painful. Why no one has made Frida the patron saint of infertile women yet is beyond me.