June 30, 2012"They only made a dozen of these"
This implies it may have been a prototype, or a device that never came to market for one reason or another.
History is full of technology that has odd quirks that are caused by everything from regulation, to market timing, to warfare, to etc etc etc. A good insight can be gained from going back to Personal Computing magazines from the early 1980s, like Byte, and looking at all the 'might have been' corporations building all kinds of strange gizmos that seem to have missed the mark in some fashion. Many of them seem completely bizarre to us, but at the time, these companies were all the same size as Apple and Microsoft, all involved in the same industry, and very few could have predicted the future developments back then that seem so 'obvious' to us in 20/20 hindsight.
My pet speculative theory about the Pauli Medpod is that it could be a cancelled prototype for the US military, which only allows males into combat infantry, thus obviating the need for it to be programmed for women's specific needs, let alone for Caesarian Sections.
Even if it would 'make sense' to come out with a version of the Medpod that could do both genders, the developers might have only had a budget to create a prototype more limited in scope, (the 'male version') for their first planned customer. Once business picked up they could release upgrades and so forth. But since they only made a dozen, I assume something went awry.
Now why would it have been cancelled? There are dozens of reasons. History is full of strange and unusual cancelled military projects, you can google phrases like "Cancelled military projects" or "strange weapons" or "unusual military vehicles" for examples.
