The Adoptive Mother Left the Hospital in Tears. The Birth Mother Looked at the Same Baby and Stayed.

Christina Fisher, 36, already had an older daughter. She was struggling for money in Fort Walton Beach, Florida — at one point she described herself as basically homeless — and she did not think she could start over. She arranged an adoption with a couple in Georgia. They sent gifts. They came to the hospital. Prenatal tests, including an amniocentesis, had not flagged a problem. Abigail Lynn was born on January 11, 2016. In the NICU the adoptive mother saw her face, came out crying, and left. The agency called the next day: the couple had withdrawn.

Abigail had Treacher Collins syndrome. Cheekbones, jaw, ears and eyelids develop differently. Breathing was hard enough that she spent about five weeks in intensive care.

Cognitive function is typically unaffected. Christina later learned the baby’s father has the same condition; she does not carry the gene. She had planned another family for this child. After the rejection she kept her. “I was not fully prepared for her,” she said, “but now I can no longer see my life without either one of my daughters.” Friends, family and strangers sent money for diapers and basics. Photographer Oksana Peery made portraits of the two of them that carried the story far beyond the Panhandle.

The easy moral is that a diagnosis does not decide a child’s worth. The harder fact is logistical: a woman who had already decided she could not parent again suddenly became the parent of a medically complex newborn. She did it anyway. Years later Abigail was still with her mother — surgeries, school, a smile people recognized from those first photographs — proof that the person who walked out of the NICU was not the last word on who that baby would be.

Sources

• PEOPLE and Cosmopolitan interviews with Christina Fisher (June 2016)
• Northwest Florida Daily News local reporting (2016–2017)
• Woman’s Day feature with photographs by Oksana Peery
• GoFundMe page for Abigail Lynn