In April 2014, Walker Colt Pruett was born at 26-weeks and spent his first three months of life in a North Carolina neonatal intensive care unit. His parents, Erica and Jared Pruett, were worried about Walker’s health because he only weighed a pound when he was born and was breathing with the help of a ventilator.
Erica described how Walker looked when she saw him for the first time.
She said, “He was just so, so tiny. You couldn’t touch him. You couldn’t rub him. You just had to pat his skin, because his skin was so fragile.”
However, after ninety days in the hospital Walker was breathing and eating on his own, and his parents were gifted with a time-lapse video of his time in the NICU.
According to New York Daily News, the photographer who captured the images, Deneen Bryan, started her business after her own six-month-old daughter passed away. She said, “These images are a way to bring out the humanity of the NICU.”
She added, “It’s looking beyond the tubes, cords and machines to highlight the beauty of the miracles that occur there on a daily basis. You feel like you’ve done something really good for the world.”
Erica said the following about Bryan’s time-lapse video: “(Bryan) was excellent to us. She came every single day he was in the NICU and took a picture of him. After we left the NICU, she did a photoshoot with us. She gave us the complete rights to all those pictures.”
Thankfully, because of advances in medicine and technology, more and more preterm babies with appropriate medical care are surviving. In fact, in the United States, 80% of babies who are born at 26-weeks survive their first year. This highlights the importance of legislation protecting babies at 20-week-fetal age; the age we know they can feel pain and potentially live outside the womb. Although fetal viability and fetal pain don’t determine the worth and value of unborn life, they point to the inhuman act of late abortion.
Unfortunately, thousands of unborn babies die after 20-weeks at the hands of late-term abortionists in the United States even though statistics show that 84% of Americans want these procedures banned. As LifeNews previously reported, another preemie named Connor survived after being born at 23-weeks. In response to his survival, his mother Rachel Crockett explained that she wanted to share his story to cause people to question the legality of late-term abortions.
She said, “We were told to say goodbye to Connor and that we wouldn’t see him again. It felt like the end of the world, we were numb. We just had to sit there and wait for the nurse to say the worst, there was such relief when they told us he was OK. Later on the consultant came by and looked in on him – he could not believe Connor looked so well. I think the cut off point and abortion limit should be lowered to 20 weeks – especially considering what happened with Connor.”
Watch Walker’s remarkable time-lapse video below.
