A miracle has happened in Germany. For the first time in living memory a woman who had been in a coma for the last 22 weeks of her pregnancy has given birth to a healthy baby.
The 40-year old woman, who fell pregnant before she suffered a heart attack that left her comatose, gave birth to a boy in a German hospital last year. "Given the mother's age and the completely normal state of the child, this case is extraordinary in the scientific world and very pleasing," Matthias Beckmann from the University Clinic in the southern German city of Erlangen said on Wednesday in the British newspaper Metro. The baby is now 18 months old. Beckmann: "We wanted to keep the spectacular case secret for as long as possible to demonstrate that we're not experimenting on people and that the child is still healthy." Less than 25 cases of women who are brain death or in a coma have been known since the 1970s. All of them ended in miscarriages or deformed babies. It is most likely the boy will grow up without a mother though. Doctors have said they have "almost no hope" for the mother. More bad news came for the child when he was placed in a home, after his father decided he was unable to care for him as he had to travel often for his job.
