Samantha and David Bourner tried to have a baby for twelve years but suffered seven miscarriages and almost gave up hope for having a baby.
According to the Daily Mail, Samantha was diagnosed with Antiphospholipid syndrome, which causes an increased risk of blood clots and raises the risk of miscarriage in pregnant women. Unfortunately, all her doctors could do was prescribe Aspirin to thin the blood and another drug called Clexane to stop blood clots from forming.
The National Director of the Miscarriage Association, Ruth Bender Atik, said, “Random miscarriages are horribly common and one in four women will have at least one. It is a far smaller group that have one after another, after another. It is only one percent of couples trying to conceive who will have three or more. When it happens again and again it becomes really hard to bear – for more than half of those people they will never find out why they are miscarrying. Some couples will keep trying and some of them just feel like they need to stop because they can’t cope anymore.”
In March 2014, Samantha became pregnant for the seventh time and was ecstatic when doctors told her she was having twins. However, she lost one of the babies at nine weeks and was very worried that she would miscarry the second as well. To give the child a better chance at survival, doctors decided to insert a stitch into her cervix to try and stop it from opening too early and causing another miscarriage.
CLICK LIKE IF YOU’RE PRO-LIFE!
Miraculously, Samantha’s stitches worked and last December she gave birth to Noel Arthur Paul via emergency Caesarean section. Noel was born four weeks early but was otherwise healthy. Samantha said, “It’s been a long time coming but nothing prepares you for being a mum. It’s a lot harder than I thought it would be and I’m always tired. But it’s really exciting, watching every stage he goes through. Just seeing him every day is amazing.”
Samantha explained that she was never able to feel safe during her pregnancy because of her previous miscarriages. She said, “Everyone was getting really excited but right up until the point I was holding him I thought it was going to go wrong.”
During her pregnancy, Mrs Bourner had suffered from gestational diabetes – a condition affecting pregnant women where there is too much glucose in the blood – and had to go on a strict low sugar diet. Then, one morning she woke up to discover she had been bleeding overnight and dialled 999 in tears.
She told the operator she thought she had lost another baby and was rushed to hospital, where doctors performed an emergency Caesarean immediately.
When Noel was born, Mrs Bourner said his first cry sounded ‘amazing’.
She believes her son’s twin, whom she lost at nine weeks old, may actually have helped Noel to survive. The twin was absorbed into the womb rather than being miscarried in the normal way, a condition known as a ‘vanishing twin’ which sometimes occurs when more than one baby develops in the womb.
Mrs Bourner said: ‘Noel was always on one side of my tummy to begin with but when his twin died he moved over to where they had been.
‘I think he was looking for him or her. The sibling was a vanishing twin, I never miscarried, it was reabsorbed into the womb.
‘I believe that second twin meant there were extra hormones from that brief little life to help keep the other going.’
Research suggests that vanishing twin syndrome occurs in roughly a third of pregnancies in which an early ultrasound detects two or more developing babies.
