IDAHO (LifeSiteNews) — A healthy baby boy has shocked doctors and nurses by emerging from his mother’s womb clutching her intrauterine device (IUD).
In late January, 20-year-old Violet Quick, a Brigham Young University (Idaho) student from North Carolina, documented her son Rudy’s victory over birth control in a video that amassed over 22 million views on TikTok before she opted to make it private.
“When all the nurses come in to see a baby with his IUD,” Quick captioned the short film.
Quick, married at 19, got the Skyla IUD implant because she and her husband John Francis wanted to avoid having children yet. However, after weeks of sickness and seven positive pregnancy tests, Quick went to the emergency room where she was told that she was pregnant despite the implant she had received only 9 months before.
“I didn’t know what was going on, and so I took a test, and it was positive right away,” Quick said, explaining that pregnancy was the last thing she expected at the time. “They were all positive, and I actually went to the ER and I was seven weeks pregnant.”
Both copper and hormonal IUDs can prevent pregnancy by thickening cervical mucus in order to prevent sperm from reaching and fertilizing an egg and also by stopping ovulation. However, IUDs most often work as abortificients by weakening the lining of the uterus to prevent the human blastocyst from embedding itself in the womb.
In the last decade, the Intrauterine Device (IUD) has become an increasingly popular method of birth control. A report put out by the CDC in 2020 revealed that between the years 2017 and 2019, 10.4% of the 65.3% of women between the ages of 15-49 in the United States were using IUDs as their main form of birth control.
Read: 96% of women receiving IUDs experienced ‘pain and other side effects’: study
Despite their popularity, they are not safe for women, let alone unborn babies. LifeSiteNews has previously reported on how IUDs come with a variety of dangerous side-effects, including Pelvic Inflammatory Disease – a bacterial infection that may cause infertility, ectopic pregnancy, and constant pelvic pain. In serious cases, a hysterectomy is needed. Other side-effects of IUDs include ovarian cysts, life-threatening sepsis, the IUD attaching to the uterine wall, and/or the IUD perforating the uterus –causing scarring, infection, and damage to other organs. IUDs have also been known to cause death.
Read: Pregnant women ‘scarred for life’ by IUDs
Besides health risks to the mother, if an IUD remains implanted in the mother during a pregnancy, other risks are involved for both the mother and the baby, with studies showing that miscarriages, premature births, and risk of infection are much higher when the IUD remains during a pregnancy.
Despite the dangers associated with IUD pregnancies, Quick is not the only mother to conceive and give birth a healthy baby without removing the IUD. In 2017, LifeSiteNews reported on a similar case which became known as the “Mirena baby” when a woman with an IUD gave birth to a healthy son despite her IUD. During her pregnancy, doctors could not find Lucy’s implant anywhere – until it was discovered behind the placenta.
Lucy said at the time that although her son Dexter was not planned, “my family and I feel incredibly blessed.”
The teaching of the Catholic Church, firmly outlined in the 1992 Catechism, is that the marital act is meant to be both unitive and procreative. Thus, contraception, which stops the marital act from fulfilling its proper end, is immoral and forbidden by the teachings of the Catholic Church, no matter what the circumstance may be.
“Legitimate intentions on the part of the spouses do not justify recourse to morally unacceptable means (for example, direct sterilization or contraception),” paragraph 2399 of the Catechism states.
“‘Every action which, whether in anticipation of the conjugal act, or in its accomplishment, or in the development of its natural consequences, proposes, whether as an end or as a means, to render procreation impossible’ is intrinsically evil.”