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Woman gives birth on flight to Australia

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A woman has become a mother high above Australia after she gave birth to a baby boy on a flight from Hong Kong to Adelaide.

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Parmajit Kaur, 29, was returning home after visiting family in India when she went into labour on a Cathay Pacific flight yesterday morning.

Four doctors were on the plane to help the woman, who was 34 weeks pregnant.

Judith Hamel, a doctor, said airline staff alerted her when the woman went into labour. 'There were four of us: one surgeon, one orthopaedic surgeon, one kidney specialist and a humble general practitioner who was the only one who'd done very much in the way of deliveries, so I got that end,' she told Australian Broadcasting Corporation News.

'I got the operative end, one got the comforting end, the 'breathe, breathe, breathe' end, and the other got the looking-after-the-baby end.

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'I think we all had fun once we knew it was all safe,' she said, adding that it was a smooth, 'fun' birth.

The labour forced the plane to land in Darwin, where mother and son were rushed to Royal Darwin Hospital. The other passengers then continued their journey.

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