Mom gives birth to stillborn daughter at 16 weeks and shares the heartbreaking photos of their goodbye
An afflicted mother has shared heartbreaking images of her baby's lifeless body in an attempt to encourage women to talk about the "lonely loss" of miscarriages and fetal death.
28-year-old Justine Zampogna, from Perth, Australia, decided to terminate the pregnancy on the doctor's advice because her baby's brain had stopped growing. According to the doctor, the fetus didn’t have a chance to survive.
The doctor told her that if she decided to continue with the pregnancy, there was a 99% chance that the baby was to die in a matter of hours after birth.
So they would induce labor after taking medication and give birth to their baby at just 16 weeks of gestation. Read more on our Twitter account @amomama_usa
Zampogna shared her difficult journey in a blog about maternity, hoping to ventilate her feelings and in the process letting others who might be going through something similar learn from her experience.
“I believe giving birth is a real spiritual endeavor and after all, I felt like we deserved to have our very own precious ‘birth story’ too.”
-Justine Zampogna, Dream Your Baby, December 4, 2018.
The sadden mother told her story in detail and accompanied it with heartbreaking images after realizing how few people talk about the loss of a baby.
We have to treasure every moment we are given with our loved ones because we never know how much time we have. Zampogna knew this and did the best she could under the circumstances.
Zampogna was full of illusions with her little one, who she had already named Gia, which reportedly means “a gift from God.”
The young woman and her husband Ty, who have been together since they were 16 years old, had their first child, Chase, in January 2016, and began trying for a second child in April 2018.
But her 14-week scan revealed that “Gigi” suffered from anencephaly, a fatal defect in the neural tube, which causes that if a baby reaches term, he or she can only survive a few hours, as the doctors warned Zampogna.
We have to treasure every moment we are given with our loved ones because we never know how much time we have. Zampogna knew this and did the best she could under the circumstances.
Despite the harsh decision of having to choose the lesser of two evils, at week 16, Zampogna opted to take a pill that would stop the placenta from working and induce the early delivery of her baby.
On August 27, 2018, she was induced to deliver, and after giving birth, as the nurses supervised that everything was under control, the parents were able to stay by the little body of their little girl, living the first and last moments of “Gigi” in this world.
But nothing could have warned 48-year-old Sophie Smith from Sydney, Australia, until the last minute, when she and her husband Ash learned that her triplets had very little chance of making it beyond a few weeks.
In less than a month after the delivery, Sophie saw her babies die one after another.
She was lucky to have a devoted husband next to her at all times, and they managed to have two healthy children following this loss before tragedy struck again and claimed Ash’s life.