This Baby Is the Smallest Baby to Ever Survive

As an expecting parent, you want nothing more than the birth of your child to go perfectly. You have been carrying this child and nurturing it for 9 months doing everything you can, and would hate to see anything go wrong.

Unfortunately, sometimes things do. Sometimes they are minor problems and other times they can be major. And the tough part is, you never really know until the whole process of giving birth begins. One of the most common issues is a premature birth.

Premature birth is exactly what it sounds like, and is when a baby is born before it is expected to. A baby can be born prematurely for a few days, a few weeks or sometimes even more. As I mentioned, this is a fairly common issue as around 15 Million babies are born prematurely each and every year. Unfortunately, almost 1 Million die from complications of pre-term birth and others can go through a lifetime of struggles.

Now one of the biggest features that almost anyone will notice about a premature baby is that they are usually very small, but none in the history of the world has been smaller than Emilia Grabarczyk who was born in a hospital in Witten, Germany. She is being considered a miracle and medical sensation as she is thought to be the smallest ever baby to survive a premature birth.

Her mother, Sabine, was forced to undergo an emergency C-section as doctors believed that Sabine’s placenta was not going to be able to continue to provide proper nutrition, so Emilia would not survive. So, at only 25 weeks (a full term is 40 weeks), Emilia was born.

When she was born, it was shocking just how small she was. She weighed in at just 8 ounces when she was born and was only about 8 inches long. For reference, a normal birthweight and size for a baby is 116 ounces and they normally measure almost 20 inches long. That means Emilia weighed less than 10 times that of a normal sized newborn and was less than half as long. With these shocking stats, doctors thought she was a long shot to survive at all.

But due to the amazing work of the doctors and nurses at the hospital (as well as Emilia’s inherent will to live), the baby survived, and as a result became the smallest ever newborn to survive a premature birth. And while she survived birth, there was little doubt she would survive much longer and if she did, there could be major disabilities or other issues in her future, but thankfully, the doctor has said that nine months after her birth, none of that has come up yet.

For the first six months there were major concerns about her, but over the last three, she has shown great improvement. At nine months old, she has no signs of future problems, yet still only weighs about the same size as a newborn. While some difficult days were in her past, Emilia was strong and had the will to survive, which she did.