7 months ago
29
Beth and Kyle Long were so excited. After four years of trying to have a baby, through multiple rounds of expensive and difficult fertility treatments, Beth was finally pregnant.
The implanted fetus had a heartbeat seven weeks in. “We’d spent years working on this, thousands of miles, thousands of dollars trying to get here, and it finally felt like it was worth it,” said Kyle in this gutting CNN story. Things still looked good at week 16, and the Ohio couple shared the happy news with their family at Christmas.
But things took a cataclysmic turn after the new year, when blood work suggested that all was not well. Further tests discovered that their baby had limb body wall complex, a rare condition in which the baby’s organs had developed outside of the body. “They will die. There’s no way there will be a life,” a doctor told CNN of the condition.
