A baby born prematurely in the Mexican city of Puebla was wrongly declared dead. The Daily Mail reports that the baby boy was born on October 21 at just 23 weeks gestation. After an estimated six hours in a morgue refrigerator, undertakers arrived to retrieve the body and were stunned to find the newborn breathing and crying.
According to reports about the incident, the unnamed baby boy was born at 4:29 AM local time at La Margarita Hospital in Puebla. Undertakers did not go to retrieve the body until after 10 AM, meaning that the premature baby survived six hours in the morgue refrigerator.
Video captured the moment the boy’s father, who was with the undertakers, saw that his son was alive and encouraged him to stay strong. The shocking moment is going viral. In the video, the unidentified father can be heard urging the baby, “Here I am. Carry on fighting, little one…” The desperate father says, “Please God, accompany this little one, stay with him because he’s still alive.”
One of the undertakers from Funeraria Flores, Miguel Angel Flores, said, “When we arrived we realised it [the baby they thought was dead]was crying and moving.” He continued, “We called the father over and he also saw it was crying and so we got the doctor who had signed the death certificate to come urgently.”
The stunned undertaker explained, “I can’t understand how he didn’t die while he was there. The fridge it was in is normally used to keep the limbs of amputees. I’ve never experienced anything like this before.”
Preliminary reports from the baby’s medical team indicate that he is alive and under observation.
A statement from the government agency that oversees the hospital read in part, “It [the baby boy]was found to have no vital signs and was pronounced dead and transferred to the hospital morgue area. When the body was about to be handed over to a relative, medical staff and a representative of the undertakers realised the baby was alive.”
The statement added that the health of the baby was “impossible to predict” because the child was born so prematurely, though, of course, the lack of needed medical care in the hours after birth could have serious consequences. The statement added only, “The case is being investigated.”
The video footage shows the baby is unmistakably a fully formed human being. At 23 weeks, the baby is only a little past the halfway point in a full-term pregnancy, yet there is no doubt that the child is highly developed and struggling to breathe on his own. Even before this stage, a baby’s ability to sense stimuli and respond to environment is fully present. That is why Texas, and many other states following Texas’s lead, protect babies from abortion beginning at 20 weeks gestation. By this point, science demonstrates that babies undeniably feel the pain of abortion.
This sophisticated development does not appear suddenly at 20 weeks; emerging science suggests that babies can experience pain even in the first trimester of pregnancy. The science of preborn pain compelled an anti-Life researcher to admit that babies in the womb may experience pain.
Despite this clear and compelling evidence of fetal development, abortions continue to occur. In Texas, even babies past the 23 weeks at which the baby boy survived can be killed in an abortion if the baby may have a congenital abnormality or genetic condition.
The shocking story of the baby mistakenly abandoned in a hospital morgue is a reminder of what abortion is. In this case of negligence, people are outraged to see a vulnerable child struggling to survive when left without medical care. And yet, other children at the same stage of development can legally be killed violently in abortion or left to die after surviving a botched abortion.
When we devalue some human lives, all human Life is at risk. Seeing the fragile but irrepressible life of a boy born so early and not given the care he deserves should remind us how urgent the fight for Life is. Texas must begin with protecting all lives at the stage of development when babies undeniably feel the pain of abortion. The abortion industry has never challenged the 20-week abortion ban in Texas because they know that they lose in the court of public opinion when they have to talk about the preborn baby. When the public has to face the child in the womb, Life wins.
