Four cases involving babies born to their brain-dead mums

Last July a healthy baby girl, Faith, was born at 35 weeks’ gestation in Alaska.

For the previous 23 weeks, her mother Jessie Ayagalria had been in a coma on life support so that her baby would survive.

Ms Ayagalria had suffered a massive heart attack. Early on in the coma, it was established that she had little brain activity and would not survive.

However, as the family faced the heartbreaking prospect of taking her off life-support, they were told by doctors that it may be possible for her to carry the baby to a point where it could be delivered.

The family decided they wanted to give it a go and Ms Ayagalria was put on a feeding tube, IV and oxygen.

Nearly six months later, Faith was delivered by caesarean section weighing six pounds and one ounce.

Last February, Iver Cohen Benson was born at 28 weeks in Canada.

Just six weeks earlier, his father Dylan had found his mother Robyn unconscious on their bathroom floor while she was 22 weeks pregnant. She had suffered a brain haemorrhage and was brain dead. However, Dylan was told that if they could keep her body alive for four more weeks, there was a significant chance the baby would survive.

Just after Iver was born Dylan wrote on his blog that they had had to say goodbye “to the strongest and most wonderful woman I have ever met”.

“She will live on forever within Iver, and in my heart,” he wrote. By May, Dylan was able to take Iver home from hospital.

In 2005, there was not such a positive outcome for another baby, carried by her mother who was brain dead.

Susan Torres had suffered a stroke caused by melanoma that had spread to her brain when she was 17 weeks pregnant. Her baby, Susan Anne Torres was born prematurely three months later. She survived for five weeks, but died of heart failure.

At the end of last year, a baby was born to a Hungarian woman who had suffered a massive stroke and was declared brain dead at just the 15th week of her pregnancy.

For the next three months, the mother was fed with special nutrient-rich fluids and at 27 weeks, the baby was born. Life support to its mother was then switched off.