It’s not every day that a mother goes into premature labor on an airplane — but when it happened in early August, Chinese neonatal nurse Chen Shanshan was ready to jump into action, and helped save a 25-week baby’s life.
Chen, who works in the neonatal department at Hainan Provincial People’s Hospital, was on a Southern Airlines flight to Beijing. On that same flight was the expectant mother, surnamed Zhang, and the mother’s four-year-old daughter. Zhang began to experience contractions, and rushed to the plane’s bathroom, where she gave birth to her baby girl in the toilet.
The baby, weighing just 820 grams, initially wasn’t breathing and had no pulse.
When flight attendants asked medical staff onboard to try to save the preemie, Chen and two doctors, her colleagues, rushed to the aid of mother and baby. Zhang was holding her palm-sized baby daughter, with the fetal membrane still attached, in her hand. Quickly but calmly, Chen tore the membrane from the baby and began performing CPR on the tiny preemie while keeping her warm with a hot water bottle.
“Premature babies must be kept warm,” she later told China Daily, according to The Standard. “Even one degree of decrease in body temperature could lead to sepsis and the mortality rate would rise.”
The doctors helped to restart the baby’s heart, and Chen continued performing CPR on the baby for approximately 90 minutes, until the preemie could be rushed to a hospital after an emergency landing in the Hunan province.
Chen has received an outpouring of praise for saving the baby girl’s life. According to China Daily and The Standard, she thanked the doctors who worked with her and the flight staff. “Without their assistance I couldn’t have finished this emergency task smoothly,” she wrote.
The baby’s father gave Chen heartfelt thanks in a video, the South China Morning Post reports.
“Thank you for being there at the critical moment. We will tell our kid and she will remember you forever,” the father told Chen.
This story is one of many celebrating the live births of premature babies. Sadly, abortion still claims many lives at the same gestational age as this little baby girl was born. In the United States, abortion is allowed even up until birth in 9 states. Remarkably, preemies have survived after being born at as young as 21 weeks.
