Miracle twins born at 23 weeks celebrate first birthday.

Brother and sister, Cadence and Jaxon Moore were born weighing just 1lb 1oz and 1lb 6oz, less than a bag of flour, and were predicted slim chances of survival when they were delivered by emergency c-section in September 2015.

 

In the UK, the legal limit of gestation period for an abortion is 24 weeks, and these little miracle babies were born at just 23 weeks and 6 days old. Their arrival into the world is even more miraculous when considering that they were embryos adopted by their parents Matt and Jourdan Moore.

 

In the USA, left over from couples using IVF, there are an estimated 650,000 fertilised eggs, and hearing about this from a friend is what inspired the couple to take the route of adopting embryos to start their own family.

 

Jourdan the mum, 32, and from Oregon in the United States said:

"Families who are complete are faced with a choice: to pay a storage fee to keep the embryos frozen, have them discarded or donate to science or embryo adoption. We'd really had it in our hearts to adopt a child, to bring a child into our home, who wouldn't have a home without us." 

 

Matt the dad, 33, works in construction and Jourdan is a housewife. After the couple got married in 2005, they started their plans for a family straight away.

 

However, with Jourdan suffering severely from Crohn's disease, much of her time was spent in surgery and taking various medicines to treat her chronic inflammation of the intestines. She responded to just one treatment; methotrexate which is used for cancer treatment and people with autoimmune diseases. The problem with this drug was that it is also used to induce abortions, hence she could not have a baby while she was taking the drug.

 

So, the couple started looking into adoption options. After waiting ten years though, they had still had no luck. Unable to carry a baby to term herself, Jourdan's friend Hollie Mentesana offered to be a surrogate and carry their embryos if they were to use the embryo adoption scheme from which they eventually adopted 7 embryos. The embryos came from an anonymous family who had had a baby from the batch of embryos.  Then on the 28th April 2015, they transplanted 2 embryos into Hollies womb.

 

At the beginning the pregnancy went as normal and on the 20th of May the couple were told that they were going to have non-biological twins. However, on the 18th of September Hollie was suffering pressure in her lower abdomen and thought she might have a bladder infection. Jourdan and Hollie went to Portland's St Vincent's Hospital to get it checked out.

 

When they had been seen, they were told that Hollie was 10cm dilated, i.e. in labor and would need an emergency Caesarean to deliver the babies. They predicted little chance of survival once the babies left the womb at such an early stage of gestation.

 

Jourdan said: "The doctor looked at me and said the babies are coming right now and at 23 weeks they will not make it. I didn't want to believe it, as we'd come through so much to reach that stage. Still, we had no choice but to prepare ourselves for their deaths." 

 

The doctors said that they could resuscitate and give life support, or choose palliative care, advising the latter as the preferred option.

 

"The survival rate for resuscitation was 21 per cent," Jourdan said. "The doctors wanted to let nature take its course, but we couldn't give up on our miracle children. Thankfully, we didn't and now we have two gorgeous one-year-olds. It's amazing." 

 

Five days after they went to the hospital, Jaxson and Cadence were born.

The infants, especially their organs, were very underdeveloped, their nipples hadn't even formed yet. Their eyes hadn't opened, it took two weeks for them to open their eyes. The babies were each placed in an incubator in the neonatal intensive care unit (NICU) where they stayed for a total of 98 days.

 

At five and eight days old, the two parents were finally able to hold their newborn babies.

The babies' hearts were not properly closed, but the doctors gave them medication and they developed normally over time. They suffered from an eye disease common in premature babies called retinopathy of prematurity. Blood vessels which are abnormal grow in the retina which causes it to eventually detach from the back of the eye resulting in blindness. The conditions of both babies disappeared over time but after a while it was discovered that Jaxson is short-sighted and needs glasses.

 

In three months of hospitalisation, Jourdan only went home once for a period of two hours. 

 

She said: "As an adoptive mother, I never had a chance to feel the babies kick inside the womb. I did five hours of skin-to-skin contact every day with each baby, so I was able to bond with them at such a young age." 

 

Finally, two weeks before the twin' due date of the 14th of January, on the 31st of December, the babies left hospital ready to start 2016 in their new home.

 

The babies have physical and occupational therapy to help them develop correctly. Cadence, has suffered from chronic lung disease ever since the NICU, is on oxygen at night because her lungs are underdeveloped.

 

The babies are expectedly very small for their age, nonetheless, they have made remarkable progress. Jaxson now weighs 16lbs and Cadence weights 17lbs.

 

Jourdan commented: "It wasn't until two thirds of the way through our hospital stay that we were sure they would be fine. I was in the NICU every day and saw babies that didn't make it, despite being born bigger and stronger than mine. I'm so blessed and lucky that we had a good outcome, but that's not the case for everyone."