A baby girl delivered by British doctors two days after her mother was declared clinically dead from a brain haemorrhage has been named Aya, which means miracle in Arabic, her father told a British newspaper Tuesday.Doctors at the John Radcliffe hospital in Oxford kept the heart of 41-year-old Jayne Soliman beating for two days after she collapsed at home last Wednesday when an aggressive tumour struck a major blood vessel in the brain.
Two days later, Aya Jayne, weighing 950 grammes, was delivered 25 weeks prematurely by Caesarean section. Soliman, a professional ice-skating champion, was given large doses of steroids to help the baby's lungs develop. Although exceedingly rare, this is not the first time a baby has been kept alive in the womb of a dead mother. In 1999, a boy was born at Cabuenes hospital in Gijon, northern Spain, on New Year's Eve to a mother who had been clinically dead since mid-November.
Soliman's husband, Mahmoud, 29, told the Daily Mail Tuesday that it had been his wife's greatest wish to be a mother. He had met his wife, a convert to Islam, in Abu Dhabi, where she worked as an ice-skating coach. She was a professional skater who, in 1989, was both British champion and number seven in the world for professional free skating. Reports said Soliman had been healthy throughout her pregnancy, and continued working as a coach. She had been on the ice last Wednesday before she suddenly collapsed.