This Boy Was Born at 18 Weeks, Then His Mum Carried Him and Saw Something That Made Her Heart Stop

At 18 weeks, a baby is at least 5.5 inches long and, even though all its fingers, toes, and other body parts are already formed, it is still too fragile to live outside the warm interior of its mother’s womb. Charity Tanner, the mother in the story, was a loving and caring mother who would do anything to keep her baby safe. She tried to prevent a premature delivery from happening because she knew her baby wouldn’t survive, but nature took its course, and she had to deliver the baby.

It all started with two lines on the pregnancy test indicating that Charity was pregnant with another child. Charity had noticed the signs of pregnancy, as she was already a mother of two, but decided to take a test to confirm. The result was positive, and their joy knew no bounds when her husband, Matt, came back. He was so overjoyed and couldn’t wait to share the news with their little children for the big reveal.

Charity and Matt gave their kids gift bags with baby socks, swaddling blankets, and the framed ultrasound picture and asked them to guess what the items meant. Ryan, their eight-year-old son, said, “Baby stuff!” After a while, he said, “You’re pregnant!” with a big grin on his face. This was shown in a video Charity recorded at the event. The family was pretty excited to welcome the baby, and the children, in particular, couldn’t wait to meet their younger brother.

Just about a month after Charity began to bleed, a pregnant woman bleeding means there was something wrong somewhere. Charity was so afraid she might have miscarried, so she quickly went to the hospital to see a doctor. The doctor said that she had a complication called placenta previa.

This condition is when a baby’s placenta attaches to the wrong place in the mother’s uterus, and in Charity’s case, the baby was covering her cervix. The doctors told her that, in most cases, the problem often corrected itself, and that in worse cases where no correction was made, they would have to perform a Caesarean section once the baby made it to at least 24 weeks. At 24 weeks, the baby had a good chance of surviving despite being born prematurely. Charity was hoping the problem would correct itself, but the bleeding didn’t stop. It even got worse.

“I was basically bleeding non-stop. It was just getting heavier as the days passed. I can’t even describe how scared I was; it was a horrifying experience,” Charity said. When the bleeding got worse, even the doctors were confused. They tried everything they could, but it yielded no results. Charity and Matt were so worried, but the mother of two was determined to keep their baby alive, so she kept on going to the doctor, hoping for good news.

One day, when she visited her obstetric clinic, she met a new doctor she had never seen before. When the doctor saw how severe the bleeding was, he encouraged Charity to terminate the pregnancy, as that was the only way to stop the bleeding. She said he told her, “They had seen this kind of thing before, and I might just keep bleeding and risk having something happen to me, or I had the option to terminate.” Charity couldn’t believe her ears.

She knew the doctor was just giving her options, but the unbelievable part was how casually he had recommended terminating the pregnancy. “My husband and I were like, ‘No, that’s not even an option. There was nothing at all wrong with this baby. He’s perfect. He’s completely, perfectly, and beautifully formed. I was going to do everything in my power to keep him alive,’ ” she said.

Charity and Matt had seen during a scan how perfectly formed their baby was, and they couldn’t even consider abortion. The baby was one they had been anticipating. “My baby had its own life, its own beating heart, and it was alive and had potential. Taking all that away was not something I could do,” she said.

Long before the baby was conceived, Matt had dreamed about a baby boy who was going to bring something special into their family. So when Charity found out she was pregnant, they had both been sure it was going to be a boy. And when the scan confirmed it, they knew their special boy was there. So clearly, abortion was not an option for them.