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Sterilized grandmother calls her new baby ‘a little miracle’

The sterilized mother of three became unexpectedly pregnant despite having her fallopian tubes cauterized and clipped.

Debbie Amos had her fair share of children by the age of 30. After having three children, she decided to have a sterilization operation.

Imagine her surprise when she found out that the operation, which was supposed to have a 99 percent success rate, had failed her; she was pregnant for the fourth time, 13 years after the operation.

“At the end of July, I started feeling tired and then felt movements in my stomach,” said Amos, 43, of Colchester, Essex.

“I thought I could feel something. I thought it was wind at first, but I was tired as well so I thought I better do a test. I did a pregnancy test, which was positive. I still didn’t believe it, and I had to sit down for about half an hour. I thought it must be a big mistake. When I showed my husband he said, ‘Whose is that?’ I didn’t really believe it until he came out.”

When Amos attempted to have her first child, she found out that she had trouble conceiving. At the age of 19, she began taking a fertility drug called Clomid to aid with conception. After having two children, Amos and her husband Melvyn decided they were done, and Amos discontinued the Clomid.

Debbie Amos said: “They said I wouldn’t fall pregnant without taking Clomid, so I didn’t take any precautions because I was off the drug. Then four years later I fell pregnant with Rebecca.”

Not wanting to take any more chances, she went to Colchester General Hospital to have the sterilization procedure. “‘I was doubly sterilized—my fallopian tubes were both cauterized and clipped, so I thought there was no way I could get pregnant again,” said Amos.

“And as you get older it is harder to conceive anyway, so it is the last thing I expected.”

The couple considered the option of filing suit against the hospital, but decided against it because they were given a 1 percent chance of the procedure failing.

Despite the unplanned pregnancy, their healthy new baby, Connor, was delivered without problems.

Amos said: “We were very relieved he is fit and healthy. I didn’t have any tests as I didn’t know I was pregnant until so late on, and there were obviously added risks because of my age. When you think of all the things that could have gone wrong, he is just a little miracle.”

“We are getting used to the nappies and the lack of sleep—my husband has taken to it again and he is coping well. We wouldn’t change him for the world.”

         

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Choices, Choices! New Baby or Health Insurance?

Some women in the United States are forced to make a choice between having a baby or paying for health insurance.  Families are struggling with very difficult choices as the healthcare debate continues in Washington.

ABC’s Tom Shine reports that Peggy Robertson ran into problems when she was shopping for more affordable health insurance for her family.  Her husband is self-employed, and she has two young boys.  Robertson was shocked when the Golden Rule Insurance Company denied the family coverage due to her C-section when he son Luke was born in 2006.  “I called Golden Rule and they said that if I would get sterilized, they would then be able to offer insurance to me.”

Amanda Buchanan’s family also faced difficult choices concerning health insurance.  Her husband hired on as a teacher for a rural school at a salary of $33,000 a year.  It would cost the family $760 a month to cover the entire family under the school’s group health insurance policy.

That was a huge chunk of change out of her family budget, so Amanda went shopping for an individual policy to cover just her and her son.  The policy Amanda found for $280 a month carried a maternity deductible of $5,000.  At the time they were not planning to have another child.  A few months later, things canged and they contemplated having a second baby.  Amanda became angry that her insurance company seemed to be discouraging the addition to their family.  She felt like the insurance company was forcing her to pay basically the entire cost if she had a typical pregnancy.

Amanda and her husband decided to have a baby, and then planned to take Amanda off of the insurance.  The money they saved would be used to pay down their medical debt.  They thought they had arrived at a plan that would allow them to have another baby.  The couple was in for a rude awakening though when their second child was born.  Even though the hospital agreed to write off their bill, the medical expenses from the pregnancy and delivery “ate up 28 percent of our net income in 2008,” according to Buchanan.