Story by Brad and Sherry Steiger

Psychologists have only begun to explore the many subtle, unconscious links that exist between the expectant mother and the child that she nurtures within her womb. A growing number of medical researchers are coming to accept a mother’s claims of sensing her baby in utero as far more than a romantic hypothesis.

Dr. Marshall Klaus believes that during the final months of pregnancy, a mother naturally works to bond with her unborn child. She sings and talks aloud to the child within her womb because she knows that the child hears and responds with synchronous body movements.

Dr. Klaus suggests that the bond between mother and child is established in strange, mysterious, and unfathomable ways. Anyone else around literally gets caught in the magnetic fields of attraction weaving back and forth. The self has divided and reunites with the self. The hologram part starts immediately moving into and reflecting the whole.

Further describing the mystical process of mother-child bonding, Dr. Klaus says that it is as if the mother posesses a kind of “magical glue” that is designed to seal the new infant right into her.

But what mysterious process assumes control of the pregnancy when the mother is placed in a coma due to an accident?

Births with Mother in a Coma

Twenty-four-year-old Barbara Blodgett of Yakima, Washington, was three months pregnant when she was injured in a car accident on June 30, 1988. Although she was in a coma for five months, Barbara gave birth to Simon, a healthy baby boy, on December 9. The day after her son was born, she began emerging from the coma.

Doctors were uncertain why Barbara was able to regain consciousness, but they speculated that hormonal changes after the birth might have been responsible. While her complete recovery from the brain stem injuries suffered during the accident continued to handicap her to some degree, Barbara Blodgett spelled a message for readers of USA Today on February 14, 1989, when she pointed out the letters for the words “Never give up.”

In January 1998, even though she had been in a coma for seven months, 21-year-old Ledy Minguzzi gave birth to a healthy baby girl at Lugo Hospital in Rome, Italy.

Ledy had suffered a brain hemorrhage when she was one month pregnant, and to prepare her for the delivery of her baby, neurosurgeons performed a complex surgery that brought her into a state called “vigilant coma.” In this level of consciousness, Ledy remained paralyzed but could communicate with the doctors by blinking her eyes.

After the caesarean birth, Dr. Marco Mattucci placed the five-pound, four-ounce baby girl on Ledy’s breast. According to the doctor, a single tear of joy ran down Ledy’s cheek. In Dr. Mattuci’s opinion, this was a certain sign that Ledy understood what had happened. The Vatican’s newspaper Osservatore Romano said that the surgery conducted by Dr. Mattucci and his staff was “a masterpiece of life.”

Withdraw Life Support?

On April 24, 1999, a pregnant Maria Lopez entered a coma after complaining of headaches and nausea. Although at first the doctors at the University of California Medical Center assessed the symptoms as a result of the pregnancy, upon closer examination of their patient they discovered that Maria had been born with arteriovenous malformation, a condition in which blood vessels in the brain are malformed or tangled.

Medical personnel sought to treat Maria Lopez’s condition by a process called embolization, during which the blood flow to the brain is lessened. In spite of their concerted efforts, however, Maria remained in a coma.

After three weeks had passed with no signs of improvement, doctors at the UC medical center advised Lopez’s family that they should consider withdrawing life support. Sadly, the decision was made to do as the doctors recommended for the sake of their comatose Maria. A priest was summoned to give her last rites.

Then, just as the priest was concluding the service, Maria Lopez coughed.

The attending physicians, not wishing to appear without compassion, nevertheless told the family gathered around Maria’s bed for the last rites that her cough was only a kind of reflex.

However, the Lopez family saw the movement from their beloved Maria as a sign from God. Sylvia Hernandez, Maria’s sister, said that it was a sign that Maria was not ready to die, that she wanted the family to give her more time to come around.

A few days later, Dr. John Frazee, a vascular neurosurgeon at the UC Medical Center, was astonished when Maria awoke from her coma and responded to his commands. Dr. Frazee commented that whether or not Maria’s cough had been a sign from God, it had saved her life, because it had convinced the Lopez family to keep her on life support.

Several days after Maria had communicated with Dr. Frazee, she slipped back into a coma. Once again, her family did not give up on her.

And it was a good thing that the Lopez family had a strong faith in God and in the eventuality of their daughter’s recovery. Maria awakened again, this time for good, and six days later give birth to healthy twins.

While doctors at the Medical Center said that they could offer no explanation for Maria Lopez’s recovery, Dr. Scott Strum commented that numerous studies in medical literature gave credence to the idea that a nurturing, loving, and supportive family is a great factor in the recovery process.

Awakening to a Baby

On January 14, 2001, Shannon Kranz­berg delivered her daughter Megan while in a coma incurred following a November 16, 2000, car crash in Dallas, Texas. Then, amazingly, a week later Mrs. Kranzberg awakened from the coma to find that she had given birth to a daughter.

“I just woke up, and the baby was there,” Shannon told The Dallas Morning News. According to attending physicians, Megan’s birth was two months premature, evidently triggered by the staph infection that Shannon Kranzberg had contracted while in the hospital.

Michael Kranzberg had accepted the grim possibility that his daughter would never be born and that his wife would never regain consciousness. When Shannon and Megan were released on March 15, Michael informed the media that Shannon was his hero, and he offered their miracle as a testimony to anyone who might find themselves in their situation that they must always keep faith.

In Coma Throughout

On July 23, 2001, 24-year-old Chastity Cooper of Warsaw, Kentucky, gave birth to her daughter Alexis after having been in a coma since two weeks after conception. As far as is known, this was the first time that a woman was in a coma throughout the entire term of her pregnancy. Alexis Michelle Cooper weighed a healthy seven pounds, seven ounces.

Chastity, who had previously given birth to two boys, ages four and three, suffered a severe head injury in an automobile accident on the rainy night of November 25, 2000. She had dropped off the boys at her sister’s and was driving on U.S. 42 to meet her husband at a family gathering when her car slid into the path of another. Routine medical tests performed during Chastity’s emergency treatment at University Hospital in Cincinnati, Ohio, indicated that she was pregnant. Since it was only two weeks after conception, even her husband Steve hadn’t known that they were about to become parents again.

Dr. Michael Hnat, an obstetrician who specializes in high-risk pregnancies, said that the pregnancy did not appear to complicate Chastity Cooper’s condition. Doctors had been alert to such potential problems as blood clots, and they had induced labor about a week prematurely to better manage the birth and the comatose patient’s welfare.

Steve Cooper told the Cincinnati Enquirer that little Alexis, their newborn daughter, was precious. He said that Chastity and he had wanted a daughter for a long time. Cooper also said that although his wife was not able to move or to talk, he was certain that she was aware of Alexis’s birth. He said that he had placed the baby on Chastity’s side and she had smiled and established eye contact with her daughter. Cooper was convinced that a bond had been established between mother and baby.

Sight Regained

An astonishing report in the November 14, 2002, issue of the Norwegian newspaper Aftenposten told of a woman who regained her sight through the miracle of childbirth.

Twenty-nine-year-old Mona Ramdal was born with toxoplasmosis, an infection which can cause eye or brain damage in infants. Because of the infection, Mona’s right eye had always been afflicted with limited vision, and when she turned 13, her left eye also began to fail. Eventually, Mona was left with only 15 percent vision remaining in her left eye and scarcely any in her right eye.

But when she became pregnant, a most wonderful series of miracles appeared to be set in order. The sight in Mona’s left eye began to return. By the time her daughter Anne-Marthe was born in 2001, Mona could see. Within a few months after Anne-Marthe’s birth, Mona applied for a driver’s license and passed the tests on her first attempt.

Dr. Per Hvamstad, who has treated Mona Ramdal since the late 1970s when she was a little girl, said that he had never read or heard of a similar case of loss of eyesight restored through pregnancy. Since the retina is by medical definition a part of the brain, Dr. Hvamstad explained, once it is destroyed, it is gone forever. That is why, in his opinion, the restoration of vision in someone such as Mona Ramdal, who was terribly visually impaired, must be considered a miracle.

An NDE During Birth

Esther Gordon told us that when complications developed during the birth of her son, she lay for a time on the delivery table, officially diagnosed as dead.

Problems arose shortly after she had been admitted to a North Dakota hospital on July 22, 1985, and unfortunately suffered a day and night of excruciating labor pains.

“The pain was so terrible that I lost conscious­ness several times,” Esther related. “And I think the pain was made even worse by the fact that my husband Scott had just left for New York on a business trip. We thought that we had plenty of time for him to make a four-day trip and return home in time for the baby to come, but we had certainly been wrong. This was in the day before everyone carried cell phones with them wherever they went, and our neighbor, Pauline, said she would keep trying to leave messages and get hold of Scott. My parents and sister, as well as Scott’s family, lived in Seattle, and my mother was making arrangements to fly out to be with me.

“When it came time for me to deliver, I was in a state of shock. I had lost touch with reality and had become unconscious.”

Then, according to Esther, she was floating through space in the most beautiful place she had ever seen. She remembered feeling free and thinking what a won­derful sensation she was experiencing.

Esther recalled drifting down a long, dark tunnel that seemed to stretch ahead of her for miles and miles. Finally, she reached its end.

“There, at the end of the tunnel, I saw a baby boy, also floating in space,” Esther said. “I knew the baby was my unborn son, and I tried to reach out for him. That was when I heard or felt him say inside my consciousness, ‘Mommy, you have to go back so that I can be born!’”

Esther said that she continued attempting to touch him, to hold him.

“Your daddy and I want to name you Holden, after daddy’s grandfather,” she said. “Please, Holden, come to me. Come to your mommy.”

Later, when she was asked about her impression of the long tunnel and the effect that the sight of the baby had upon her, Esther replied that she believed that she was somewhere in the heavens and that she was dead.

“I felt absolutely and completely comfortable in that state of being,” Esther said. “I think I probably felt very much like the astronauts feel when they are floating in space, but I felt terribly sad that my baby would not be born. I thought that maybe Holden and I could still be together in the afterlife, even though he had never been able to live on Earth.”

Then, as Esther floated in space before the form of her son, the child somehow spoke again to her spirit being: “Mommy, I am going now to be born. They are taking me out of your body even though you are here with me. Please, please, come back and be my mommy. I love you. I need you. Don’t let me be born without you!”

And then the baby seemed to be propelled through space, moving away from her at a great rate of movement.

“When I looked around to see where my son had gone, it seemed as though I could see his little body zooming down to Earth far, far below me,” Esther said. “And then I could see the hospital as if I were watching some kind of movie. Next I could see right into the delivery room, and I saw the doctor and nurses working on me.”

Her doctor later told her that she had stopped breathing, and anxious medical attendants could find no heartbeat. Clinically, Esther was dead; but her doctor worked feverishly to reverse the cruel verdict. Desperately he and his staff tried every procedure they knew to bring the de­ceased woman back to life. They had just deliv­ered a healthy baby son. It would be a tragedy if they were to lose the mother.

“My doctor told me that they had fought for nearly 13 minutes to save my life,” Esther said, “but all I remember is floating into eternity—and then suddenly exerting a great effort of will. I didn’t want to die. I wanted to come back to Earth and be Holden’s mother. I wanted to see him as a baby, as a child, as a teenager, as a grown man. I knew that I had the strength of spirit to return to my body, but I knew that I could only come back if I willed it to be so.

“When I was finally able to float out of the dark tunnel, I was in an open area with blue skies and white clouds, and everything around me was beautiful beyond description,” Esther said. “When I regained com­plete consciousness, I was in an oxygen tent, and the nurse told me that I had given birth to a fine baby son.”

Both mother and child remained for several days in the hospital, thus allowing Esther ample time to recover from the tremendous strain under which her system had been placed. It was during this time that she was informed by her physician of her technical death.

Esther Gordon stated that she considered her near-death experience to have been a “wonderful” occurrence. “I am grateful that I was given an opportunity to get a good look at the next life, but I thank God for sparing me and for letting me come back so that I could take care of my son.”

A Remarkable Coincidence

We’ll end these accounts of paranormal pregnancies with a most remarkable “coincidence”:

On November 15, 2002, 36-year-old twins Amanda and Meagen Baldwin each gave birth to a son. While this in itself is unique, it becomes even more bizarre when one considers that Amanda lives in Sydney, Australia, and Meagen resides in Belgium—approximately 12,000 miles apart. And when one learns that Amanda’s son Truman was scheduled to be born on November 4, while Meagen’s son Benjamin was penciled in on the calendar to be born in early December, the births of the two cousins on the very same day becomes downright eerie.

The chain of coincidences forged its first link when the twin sisters learned in late February that they were pregnant. Via emails and telephone calls, they joked about what a bizarre occurrence it would be if they happened to give birth on the same day. However, such a remarkable coincidence seemed unlikely when their pediatricians predicted due dates that would be about a month apart.

Amanda had to be induced when she was about 11 days overdue, and after a 13-hour labor, she gave birth to Truman at 1:06 a.m. on Friday, November 15. Shortly after it was certain that she had given birth without any further complications, her husband sent Meagen an email informing her of the birth of her nephew.

And that’s when things really got strange. As soon as Meagen in Belgium learned that Amanda in Australia had given birth, she began to feel nauseated. When she went to her doctor for a pre-natal examination later that morning, Meagen was told that her baby could come at any time. That afternoon her water broke, and she went to the hospital where, at 2:40 a.m. on Friday, she gave birth to Benjamin, nearly a month before his due date.

When Meagen’s husband called to tell Amanda and her family the news of Benjamin’s birth, he could not resist saying that the two baby boys, though cousins in actuality, were really very much like twins. For, remarkably, those two first cousins, born 12,000 miles apart, will forever celebrate their birthdays on the same day, just as their mothers had always done.

Authors Brad and Sherry Steiger have collaborated on over 30 books. Their most recent titles are Pet Miracles and Conspiracies and Secret Societies. Their website is www.bradandsherry.com