Baby MiracleMSF

A heroic Irish nurse working with Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) helped to deliver a baby on a rescue boat aiding kidnapping victims. His name? Baby Miracle. 

 A Nigerian woman who was kidnapped and held in captivity for a year after traveling to Lybia safely gave birth to a baby boy, named Miracle, on board a rescue vessel, and Irish nurse Aoife Ni Mhurchu was there to help. 

Ni Mhurchu works with Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) and shared the story with RTE Radio One's Morning Ireland program. The new mother was one of 51 men and 18 women - five of whom were pregnant - rescued last week from a rubber boat off the coast of Lybia. 

She had been held for almost a year and was starving and regularly subject to beatings. The rescue came in the nick of time for the expectant mother, who went into active labor shortly after being rescued. Though she was only 34 weeks pregnant, the medical team on board the rescue boat, the MV Aquarius, attributed her early labor to the excessive stress she had endured. 

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“If she had gone into labor 48 hours earlier she would have been in a very different and dangerous situation where she would have been giving birth completely terrified, heavily pregnant and hiding on a beach in Libya," Ni Mhurchu said. 

She reported that mother and baby are doing well and are in the hospital in Sicily, where the boat docked. 

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Baby Miracle will have Nigerian citizenship.