Shannon Skinner gave birth to he daughter Amelia earlier this year after discovering she was pregnant despite undergoing an abortion.
Shannon’s delivery of her older daughter Lacie was so traumatic that doctors warned her having another child could leave her seriously ill, or worse.
20-yearold Shannon told the MailOnline: ‘We call her our miracle baby because we just don’t know how she survived. She must have really wanted to be here.’
Shannon suspected she was pregnant after feeling Amelia move in her tummy.
Amelia arrived to her shocked and surprised parents on May 1.
‘I want to believe that she is perfect, and my gut feeling is that she’s fine, which would be another miracle, but even if there are problems we don’t yet know about, it won’t change our love for her.’
Shannon elected to have an abortion out of fear that she would leave her daughter without a mother should anything go wrong.
‘I wish now I’d just walked out. I was crying my eyes out, but thinking of leaving Lacie motherless made me go through with it.’
Shannon, 20, and her partner Anthony, 24, are both struggling to think of a way they will tell their daughter her story of survival.
‘It’s such a rare thing to have happened, but we hope when she is old enough she’ll understand,’ Anthony says.
‘What she needs to know is that she is loved and wanted. If we had the chance again we would do everything differently, but we thought we were doing the right thing at the time.’
‘I’ll always regret the abortion, but I’ll never regret having Amelia,’ adds Shannon.
‘I was out of my mind with worry that the abortion pills had affected the baby, but it wasn’t until I saw the 3D scan of my daughter on Christmas Eve that I fell in love with her. Once I’d seen her face, everything was different.’
A spokesperson from Marie Stopes said on the incredible case: ‘Very occasionally, the medical abortion pill can fail. Cases like this are few and far between but, of course, that does not make the situation any less upsetting.’