Lifestyle

Firefighter Adopts A Baby He Delivered During An Emergency Call

by Jerriann Sullivan
Image via Facebook.

Marc Hadden adopted the baby girl he helped deliver

It was a slow day for Marc Hadden and his firefighter crew when they received an emergency call about a woman in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina. What the women thought was abdominal pain turned out to be labor pains. Hadden helped deliver her baby — a little girl.

“It was a pretty serious call for us,” Hadden, 47, told TODAY. “We got her on some oxygen, started some IVs, and literally as we were getting ready to leave the parking lot in the ambulance, my partner said, ‘We’re about to deliver a baby right here.'” The father of three said the delivery happened fast and before he knew it. “We had no time to prepare. Before we could do anything — we hadn’t even cut her clothes — Gracie came right out,” he shared. “Immediately she was handed to me.” It was a memorable call for the firefighter and would later become a family story shared again and again.

A few hours after the baby’s birth on Nov. 14, 2011, Hadden was at the hospital with the mom and found out she planned on putting the little girl up for adoption. He explained that it felt like a sign to him and his wife Beth, who had already been hoping for a third child and considering adoption. The family wasted no time in starting the adoption process for the newborn and two days after they met, Hadden took Rebecca Grace Hadden home. She goes by Gracie and is 5-years-old now. “She’s amazing,” her dad said. “She takes gymnastics, she’s getting ready to start kindergarten next year at the school where my wife teaches. She’s a pretty remarkable kid.”

Gracie has two older brothers: Parker, 12, and Will, 14. “The boys absolutely love her and she loves them,” shared Hadden. But she knows her birth story very well. “We have never hidden it from her,” Hadden reported. “If you ask her where she was born, she says, ‘My daddy delivered me in the back of an ambulance.’ She knows the whole story. I wanted her to know as soon as she was old enough to understand.” But he knows she’ll need to hear the story in further detail when she’s older. “It still breaks my heart to think of one day having to explain it to her more in depth … because she doesn’t really 100% get it,” he said.

The firefighter knows that his chance encounter was meant to be because of his relationship with his daughter. “Gracie and I have an amazing bond,” he explained. “We’re tighter than thieves.” The Hadden family said they wouldn’t change their family for anything.

“She is part of our family and that is absolutely the way it is,” he added. “We love her.”