Every child is a miracle, as any woman who has given birth, any father who has cradled the tiny breathing body in his hands, and every midwife knows. However, in Naharia, Israel, a birth, which was intended to be a termination of a pregnancy resembled the kind of miracles we see when the Jewish Messiah comes; when the dead will rise again.
A woman in Naharia, a town in the far North of Israel, was having a difficult pregnancy. Five months pregnant, she had gone to the hospital for tests which showed she was experiencing some intrauterine bleeding and the baby had no pulse. The doctors assumed the worst and decided to terminate the pregnancy by inducing labor. Following the procedure, an apparently lifeless baby was born. The child was not breathing, she was pronounced dead and placed in cryogenic laboratory (cryolab) to keep the body cool before the doctors would begin routine post-mortem tests to determine the cause of death.
After five hours in the cryolab, the father asked to view the body. The doctor and the father were amazed to see the baby, which was being prepared for the morgue, breathing spontaneously. The child was rushed to the infant intensive care unit and was placed in an incubator.
Dr. Moshe Daniel said he as seen nothing like this in his 35 years practicing medicine, although he believes the baby has a slim chance of survival, given the fact that she is so premature. At the same time, he acknowledged that one miracle might lead to another, and the child may survive. While there have been cases in which people have seemed to “come back to life” in a cryolab, because the cold keeps the metabolism low, Dr. Daniel says he has never seen this happen in the case of a baby.
As advanced as we become in medicine, it is still an imperfect art (and sometimes it seems an art rather than a science), I don’t know about you, but I keep hearing stories about doctors who give up hope on patients only to be baffled by their survival. Doctors provide, obviously, a valuable resource to society, and many of us owe our lives to doctors. At the same time, there is an Ultimate Doctor who truly has our fate in his hands. Life comes from a divine source, and the best our technology can do is to make attempts to preserve it.