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Miracle Baby Born Months after Mother Declared Brain Dead

CBN

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Some are calling it a miracle. An unborn baby was kept alive inside his brain dead mother for nearly four months, setting a new record.

After he grew large and healthy enough to be born, doctors delivered the child by caesarian section. The very next day his mother was buried.

This bittersweet story began in Portugal, February 20 when 37-year-old Sandra Pedro, who was about three months pregnant, suffered a brain hemmorage.

She was rushed to the hospital, but was declared brain dead. The child she was carrying was unharmed.

Doctors consulted with her family about granting permission to allow the young woman to remain alive, totally dependent on machines to feed her, help her breathe, and fortify her with the hormones necessary for her unborn child until he was developed enough to live outside the womb.

At that time, the doctors explained, she would be taken off life support. The family agreed.

For the next nearly four months, hospital staffers nurtured the baby inside its lifeless mother, as if to take her place.

Nurses stroked and cuddled the baby bump as it grew larger. They sang lullibies and talked to the growing fetus through his mother's belly. 

Meanwhile, doctors carefully monitored the child's progress until they deemed it was capable of living outside the womb. He was delivered at 32 weeks of gestation, approximately eight weeks earlier than full-term.

Physicians surgically removed the baby from its mother's womb. Young Lourenco was born healthy but small, weighing slightly more than five pounds. His maternal grandparents will raise him. 

Sandra Pedro was buried the day after Lourenco was born.

Lourenco was kept alive inside his mother's womb for an astonishing 107 days, longer than any other baby to have survived inside a brain-dead mother before birth. 

In January, a boy was born in Poland after surviving 55 days inside his brain-dead mother, while in 2013 Hungarian doctors delivered a baby kept alive in similar circumstances for 13 weeks.

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