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When Mariella Aitana Guerrero was born on a Saturday afternoon in early September, she was 6 pounds, 18 inches. She had dark hair and long eyelashes — and her life expectancy was measured in minutes.
The newborn that arrived at St. Luke’s Health-The Woodlands Hospital, just north of Houston, had anencephaly, a neural tube defect. The condition causes the baby to have only a rudimentary brain stem, with parts of the brain and portions of the skull missing.
Wrapped in a white blanket with turquoise and red stripes and a tiny pink cap placed on her head, Mariella was placed in the arms of her mother, Yessica Guerrero, 35.
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The first thing the mother noticed, she said, is that the child wanted to live.
“She had the strongest grip; she wouldn’t let go of me or my mom,” Guerrero said. “She was not crying, but she did make noises, which we didn’t think she could. She was able to eat — I could hear her belly — so I knew she was hungry, so we gave her a feeding tube.”
Guerrero was nearly giddy with joy that Mariella was clearly alive, even wetting her diaper. For the next 28 hours, family members and friends took photos, made copies of Mariella’s hand and footprints, got her baptized and changed her clothes several times.
“At one point, I told my husband I felt her heart stop, and I remember hugging her and telling her it was OK for her to go; I just want you to rest, to be at peace,” the mother said. “She let out a little scream, then her heart rate was up again. She was not ready to go. She fought and fought.”
Then at 5:28 p.m. on Sept. 8, just 28 hours to the minute after her birth, Mariella died. In a bizarre twist of fate, she was Yessica Guerrero’s second baby with anencephaly. The first, Gabriella, died at birth on Aug. 7, 2017.
The Kate Cox debate
Nearly a year ago, Kate Cox, another Texas woman pregnant with a handicapped child, created headlines by petitioning a Texas court to end the life of her fetus because the child had Trisomy 18, a birth defect that many in the media were calling a “lethal abnormality.”
Because Texas forbids nearly all abortions, Cox ended up flying out of state to abort her daughter at 20 weeks. She ignited a national debate as to whether severely handicapped children should be aborted and whether such pregnancies endanger their mothers’ mental and physical health. This debate has been reignited this fall as Vice President Kamala Harris, who favors expanding abortion rights, runs for president. In a post-Roe America, she has made abortion a central part of her party’s platform in the race against former President Donald Trump.
While many politicians were overwhelmingly in favor of Cox’s decision to abort, former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum posted a photo on X of his teenage daughter Bella in a frilly white dress with a bun and circlet of flowers atop her head. His point was that his daughter’s Trisomy 18 wasn’t necessarily “lethal.”
“My heart goes out to the Cox family,” he wrote. “I will pray for them during this difficult time. I don’t know all the details, but I do know that as a father of a 15-year-old with Trisomy 18, accepting the cross of such a baby is the hardest and most wonderful thing I have ever done.”
No publicity has gone to women like Guerrero who have chosen differently than Cox (who has since announced she is pregnant again). A soft-spoken woman who is an office manager of a dental office in the Houston suburb of Tomball, Guerrero and her husband, Rubén, were volunteers at their Catholic parish. The Catholic Church opposes aborting the handicapped unborn on the grounds that all life — no matter how disabled — has “inherent dignity.”
Guerrero asked a deacon to baptize the deceased Gabriella, not knowing church doctrine limits its sacraments, like baptism, to the living. (Miscarried and stillborn children can receive a blessing).
“When they told me on the phone they wouldn’t baptize her, I couldn’t believe that” she recalled. “I put her in a beautiful white gown, and I had some holy water, so we did it.”
The couple, who already had a boy and a girl, wished for more children. Four years ago, they had twin boys.
Earlier this year, soon after the Cox incident, Guerrero was told she had a large cyst on her left ovary. When she returned to the doctor’s office for a second look, it had vanished. Instead, she was told, she was pregnant again.
Her delight and anticipation lasted until the 20-week check-up in May. There, Guerrero was told the unthinkable: This pregnancy too was doomed; her unborn daughter also had anencephaly.
“I was really mad at God when I found out it was happening again,” she said. “There is nothing physically wrong with either one of us. We’ve done all the testing to see if we’re healthy, to see if we could have prevented it and there was nothing.”
Feeling that not only had the Catholic Church betrayed her, but so had God, she and her husband stopped going to church.
“I thought maybe there was no God,” she said. “My husband felt the same way. ‘If there’s a God,’ he says, ‘why did He take my baby?’”
When she was told the fetus was a girl, Guerrero had to think quickly. Terminations except in the rarest of cases are illegal in Texas, so if she wanted to abort, she needed to book a flight out of state quickly. She grasped for what shreds of faith remained to her.
“They kept on telling me she was incompatible with life, and she could pass at any time,” she remembered. “I asked: ‘Who am I to kill this baby?’ The only one who is going to have a say in this is God. He is going to guide me in all this.”
Two things became clear. She would keep the child for as long as the baby would live, and she would use her crisis to benefit others. Immediately, she launched a GoFundMe to try to raise money for a piece of hospital equipment for stillborn or dying newborns.
Typically, neonatal hospital staff will try to keep such children comfortable during their brief lives. Once the child dies, hospital staff have been known to whisk the baby off to the morgue, to the distress of parents who want to spend more time with the infant. A cooling bed of iced water will slow the decomposing process.
There are two versions: One, manufactured in the U.K. and called a Cuddle Cot, looks like a large, refrigerated basket. It is portable, less expensive (about $3,000) and can be loaned out to families wishing to take their child home for a day or two.
A Caring Cradle, which costs $6,995 and is manufactured in Lakeland, Florida, is a larger unit structured like a bassinet on wheels. It stays in the hospital. The child is placed and swaddled on a cooled gel mat. Guerrero’s GoFundMe campaign has raised nearly $5,000 for a cradle, which will go to St. Luke’s.