Guardia Civil Officers this week came to the assistance of a woman who had just birth in a car on the motorway.
When officers Roberto and Jose Luis arrived to the scene, the woman had already given birth to the child, a girl now named Lara. The officers, members of the Lugo Traffic patrol, were patrolling a section of the AG-64 motorway between Ferrol and Vilalba. They had been carrying out routine checks and surveillance when they saw a vehicle stopped diagonally on the hard shoulder with a man standing outside. What they did not expect to find inside the car, however, was a woman who had done the unimaginable – given birth to her baby in a car, on the hard shoulder of a motorway, in the middle of a pandemic without any medical staff present.
The two officers noticed the man was in an obviously agitated state and approached him to ask what was wrong. The man explained that his wife was inside the car, and had given birth. The officers then saw in the passenger seat, the woman holding the infant in her arms, with a pool of blood at her feet. A young boy, the couple’s son, was in the back seat of the car having witnessed his mother’s incredible bravery.
An ambulance arrived and the officers helped by redirecting traffic. Paramedics cut the umbilical cord, wrapped the little girl in a clean blanket and called ahead to ICU. The ambulance took its precious cargo to the nearest hospital where the baby’s father and older brother followed in the family car.
Interviewed by the press, the Guardia Civil officers commented that they were glad to be of help, but that they just happened to be in the right place at the right time. They offered the ambulance a police escort to hospital, but as the woman had already heroically managed labour and birth by herself, there was no medical emergency and she was cleared to proceed to hospital in the ambulance as normal.