A baby ripped from her’s mother’s womb during a car crash in Brazil has miraculously survived.
The newborn’s mother was a passenger in a truck carrying planks of wood on July, 30. The driver reportedly lost control, causing the vehicle to crash and the pregnant woman to be thrown from the cabin, then crushed by the weight of the cargo. This tore the baby girl from her womb. Though the woman was killed, her baby was born unscathed. Per U.K. newspaper Metro, she was 39 weeks pregnant at the time of her death.
Elton Fernando Barbosa, the first paramedic to arrive at the scene, was looking for victims when he heard the cries of a baby. “The fetus was literally expelled by the impact on the mother,” Barbosa told Brazil’s A Tribuna newspaper, per Metro. “The impact was so great that this opened up the mother’s belly and the child was ejected. She was perfect, healthy, without a scratch. We can say that, in those circumstances, it was really a miracle that she survived.”
Dr. Daniel Roshan, a maternal-fetal medicine specialist based in New York City, tells Us Weekly the uterus ripped open and the baby came out of the wound. “It’s probably just like a caesarean section that happened naturally due to the car accident,” he explained.
The newborn, who weighed 6 pounds, 8 ounces at birth, was treated at Pariquera-Acu hospital and given the name Giovanna, which means “protected by God.”
“She is a really calm baby, she doesn’t cry,” nurse Solange Batista told A Tribuna. “If you play with her, she even smiles.”
