Miracle Babies of Mexico City

Our new granddaughter is so sweet and adorable. S. and I so enjoyed the week that we were able to visit her at our son and daughter-in-law's home. Newborn babies seem so helpless and fragile but in some respects they are more resilient than adults. I was relating to my daughter-in-law the story about the newborn babies that survived the collapse of the hospitals where they were born after a devastating earthquake struck Mexico City in 1985. Some had no food or water for up to nine days when they were found by the rescuers. I guess that proportionally newborns have more water in their bodies than adults so they can live longer without food or water. From the Wikipedia article:

Heavy machinery was unable to get to the site until 5 days after the earthquake. Numbers of dead did not include unidentified body parts found. Most of the injured had contusion injuries and many suffered from dehydration, with the severity of the dehydration increasing with those rescued later.^[19]
However, the most memorable story to come from this event was the rescue of nearly all the newborn babies that were in the nursery at the time. These babies were pulled out of the wreckage mostly unscathed but lost their mothers.^[20] These babies were found seven days after the initial event and came to be known as the “Miracle Babies” or the “Miracle of Hospital Juárez.”^[18] The reason for this was that these babies survived without nourishment, water, warmth or human contact for all that time.^[18]

 

I went looking for the story about these newborn survivors to refresh my memory and will try to link to some articles below. I also found information about newborns surviving and being rescued days after the earthquakes in Haiti and Japan. It is amazing that God has given them this remarkable ability to survive in the most extreme conditions.

The Mexican people called them “miracle babies” and wanted to celebrate their survival every year on the anniversary of the quake but they stopped after the children were two because it just made the families remember over and over the great loss of life. Over ten thousand people died in the quake because so many buildings collapsed.

Most of the babies were raised by aunts, uncles and grandparents as their parents had perished in the quake, the mothers in the same hospitals as the children along with the medical staff. Some of the children have done very well, it has been over 25 years ago now and some have had life-long struggles. The length of time before rescue did not correlate with who did best, it was the emotional factors and other circumstances that seemed to matter more.

Here are links to a couple articles.http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/mexico/100201/miracle-babies-1985-earthquake

http://www.nytimes.com/1987/09/21/world/mexico-quake-victims-try-to-forget.html

Just click mouse on the links above to go there and read the articles.

May our little C. live long and be blessed (I think she already is with the parents she has) and be a blessing in this life to many. Our prayers will be with her and her parents as she grows.

Lou