World’s Shortest Mom Rejects Abortion to Give Birth to Healthy Baby 
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by Steven Ertelt
LifeNews.com Editor
February 29, 2008
Covington, KY (LifeNews.com) — Stacey Herald isn’t like any other typical mother. She’s small in stature — born with a condition known as osteogenesis-imperfecta — but has the courage of an average-sized women several times her size.
Herald stands just two-feet four and a half inches tall, or 28.5 inches total, and she recently rejected an abortion to give birth to a healthy 18-inch baby.
Herald says she thinks she may have set a record for the world’s shortest mother.
She recently talked with WAVE-TV about her new baby, whom she named Mukeya.
"My whole life I’ve been told that I wasn’t able to have children," she said. "I would not live through the pregnancy, that with the size of my torso, the baby would grow up underneath my lungs and smother out my lungs and my heart and we would both die."
"And something inside me just didn’t believe that," Herald told the television station.
The young woman said abortion was never a consideration. She is studying to be a minister and says children are a gift from God.
"So, when we went in and they were like, ‘You know you can’t do this, right? You need to schedule an abortion,’" Herald explained. "We said, ‘No, we’re not doing that.’ And my doctor, I love her to death, she’s so sweet, she said, ‘Okay’, she said, you know, ‘We’ll do it.’"
Herald told WAVE-TV her doctor said she’d provide the best medical care if Herald would provide the faith.
Stacey is a mother to another child, a 16-month old baby Kutera, who has the same condition, but Mukeya is expected to have a normal height.
Herald told the television station about the challenges she’ll face as a mother.
"The only thing that I cannot do for my children is like if they want from the swing set or the bed to the swing," she said. "Now Mukeya, I can, for now. I’m sure she’ll be carrying me one day."
WAVE_TV indicates that Herald and her husband Wil are hoping to have one more baby because they want a son.
