Luz Milagros, a living baby, spent 12 hours in an Argentine morgue after doctors told her parents she was stillborn. She is one of several babies who miraculously cheated death, from one child who was dragged by a train, to another who was born in a toilet.
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Analia Bouter was devastated on April 3 when officials at a hospital in Resistencia, Argentina, told her she’d given birth to a stillborn baby daughter. Twelve hours later, she and her husband went to the morgue to see the body. But when they opened the coffin, they heard the baby cry. “She spent 12 hours in the freezing cold of that morgue. I saw for myself the ice on her body,” Bouter said. Other than the cold, the baby appeared to be in good health. Her parents named her Luz Milagros, which means “Miracle Light.” The hospital director said hypothermia may have been responsible for the loss of her vital signs.
Juan Pablo Faccioli / AP Photos
In 2009, a 6-month-old baby boy almost died when his stroller rolled off a train platform at Ashburton Station in Melbourne, Australia. The stroller landed directly in the path of an oncoming train, and was dragged 33 yards up the track before the train finally stopped. But the baby was mostly unharmed. A spokesman for the train operator said, "It's a miracle this baby wasn't killed. The baby managed to escape with just a cut to the forehead, I'm told. It's a complete miracle."
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After doctors told Kate and David Ogg that their son, Jamie, born at just 27 weeks and weighing only two pounds, was dead, they put the baby on his mother’s bare chest so that the woman could say goodbye. She thought he baby was occasionally gasping for air, but she was assured that was just a natural reflex. At one point Kate thought the baby had moved as if startled, so she put some milk on the tip of her finger which he drank. Then he started to move and breathe more regularly. The doctors were so convinced of his death that they needed to be persuaded to re-enter the room. David told reporters, “Luckily I've got a very strong, very smart wife. She instinctively did what she did. If she hadn't done that, Jamie probably wouldn't be here.” Jamie’s twin sister, Emily, also survived, and Katie gave birth to a full-term baby last April.
Blake Opperman, 14 months old, vanished when a tornado destroyed his home in Millington Township, Michigan in 2009. His parents were in a panic searching through the rubble, when they finally found him lying under his mattress. It turned out the tornado had carried him out of the house and largely out of harm’s way. "He was thrown probably about 40 or 50 feet to the east of the house. We just kept trying to listen for him, cause it was still raining really hard, windy ... next thing you know the neighbor actually heard like a little cry, so we kind of just stopped moving and looking to see if we could hear him,” his father said.
Kate Williams, 3, was flying from Golden, British Columbia to Edmonton, Alberta, with her grandfather, Allen Williams, when ithe plane crashed in the Canadian Rockies. The crash killed the grandfather and one other person. Four hours later, rescuers found Kate in the plane’s wreckage, hanging upside down and still strapped in her car seat. "He was very safety conscious, not just using the car seat every time he flew, but putting it in properly. There are no anchor straps [for the car seat in a plane], but he took the time on that flight, on all flights, to strap it in. Without that being done properly she never would've survived,” Kate’s father said.
In early April, a 2-year-old Chinese boy fell into a 40-foot well and was saved by firefighters and an iPhone. Rescuers were having trouble getting an adult-sized harness around the boy, so they tied the iPhone to a rope and lowered it into the well to film him and see what position he was in. The boy didn’t sustain any major injuries from the fall.
Labor is traumatic enough, but imagine giving birth into a toilet. That’s what happened to Salina Newman, a Littleton, Colorado, woman who was six months pregnant when she went to the bathroom and thought she had a miscarriage. Newman called 911 and told the operator, "I was only six months pregnant, and I went to the restroom and I think (the baby) is in the toilet." When police officers arrived at her apartment, they found the child in the toilet still wrapped in the amniotic sac. The baby was only 1 pound 5 ounces, but was moving. Paramedics were able to get her breathing on her own, and she was nursed to health at the hospital.
Littleton police / AP Photos
Jessica Glennis Evers-Jones might just be the youngest shooting victim of all time. In 1992, two weeks before she was due to be born, her mother, Elvira Evers, was unloading groceries from her car when she was shot in the abdomen. The 9-millimeter bullet passed through the wall of Elvira’s uterus and hit Jessica in the elbow. The nearly 7-pound baby was delivered by Cesarean section and received two stitches, but was otherwise healthy. Doctors attributed the miracle to old-fashioned luck. If Elvira hadn’t been pregnant, the bullet might have severed her uterine aorta and caused her to bleed out. If the baby hadn’t been in the fetal position with her arms crossed, the bullet might have punctured her torso, causing much more damage.
Olga Shalygin / AP Photos
For 59 hours in October 1987, 18-month-old Jessica McClure of Midland, Texas, held America captive as rescue workers struggled to save her after she fell 22 feet into a pipe that was 8 inches in diameter. She suffered many injuries, including a major scar on her forehead. Gangrene set into her right foot, forcing doctors to remove her small toe. Rescue workers, who had to drill a tunnel through rock to save her, pumped fresh oxygen and heat into the pipe to sustain her. After Jessica was rescued, she was invited to a White House reception with President George H. W. Bush.
Eric Gay / AP Photos
