There have been taxi cab births before--it happened twice last year--but this is the first time an expecting father had the wherewithal to film the occasion.
The new parents had been preparing to host a video team meeting with fellow Occupy protesters Tuesday night in their Newell Street apartment in Greenpoint, Brooklyn.
"We're both really involved with the Occupy movement, and we were about to host a meeting here," Beka Economopoulos, founder of the arts collective Not an Alternative and an Occupy Williamsburg worker, told Gothamist. "People started showing up, and I started to have contractions...what started as a video team meeting turned into birth support team."
After about 45 minutes, Economopoulos, her husband Jason Jones, and a midwife jumped into a cab-- but only made it two blocks.
Economopoulos’s husband and a midwife squeezed her hips to help with the pain, but that didn’t work.
“I said, no, don’t squeeze, pull my pants down, there’s a head there,” she said.
The cab driver got out of his car at Greenpoint Avenue and waved orange flags directing traffic until two ambulances and six police cars arrived at the scene.
The video, uploaded to YouTube by Jones under the name "Occupy Baby," begins with the baby girl, Mila Amie Economopoulos Jones, being taken out of the cab by a paramedic.
“I didn’t even push it just came out,” Economopoulos can be heard saying while on the phone inside the ambulance. "I thought I had a poop and then there was a head. Jason caught the baby!"
The rest of the video follows the couple on their trip to Bellevue hospital. "The police commander actually shut down the Pulsaki Bridge and Queens Midtown Tunnel and escorted us to Bellevue," Economopoulos told Gothamist. "Ten or twelve paramedics came into hospital with us. Everyone was so excited. If they had cigars, they would have been giving them out."
And Taxi and Limousine Commissioner David Yassky offered his best wishes to the new family, telling The Paper, “There’s something so special about being born in Brooklyn that this beautiful young lady just couldn’t wait to be here!”
Economopoulos, Jones and Mila are now back at home in Greenpoint.