The tiniest survivor: How the 'miracle' baby born two weeks before the legal abortion limit clung to life against all odds

Against all odds: Amillia Taylor's
tiny feet in the doctor's hand
Miracle may be the perfect word for Amillia.

It's the iconic image of the abortion debate - the tiny feet of a baby girl born TWO WEEKS before the legal limit for terminations. But what happened next? For the first time, we tell her inspiring story...

At 18 months old, Amillia Taylor is already entering the terrible twos.

When life doesn't go her way, she stamps her little foot, pushes out her lower lip and makes her demands with a sweet baby lisp.

She is, her parents say with a smile, a 'proper little madam'. But it's a fighting spirit which has served Amillia well.

Because this bright, beguiling toddler was born at just 21 weeks and six days into her gestation - a whole two weeks before the existing abortion cut-off.

She is the world's youngest premature baby ever to survive and the image of her tiny feet poking out between the fingers of a doctor's hand were used to support calls for the lowering of the 24-week legal limit on abortion.

When she arrived, Amillia weighed less than 10oz and was just nine-and-a-half inches long, with skin which tore like rice paper.

But as the debate over lowering the abortion limit raged this week - culminating in Tuesday's Commons vote which vetoed any change in the law - she was playing happily with her dolls, like any other toddler.

The extraordinary story of her battle for life, and the mother who desperately lied to persuade doctors to try to save her, began with an IVF [In vitro fertilisation] cycle in June 2006.

Now that her story is out, she'll be the central focus in the abortion debate. She already is in England.

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Indian Gov't to Raise Unwanted Girls

There are alternatives. Ya just gotta get creative.

Its unfortunate women are having abortions just because they're pregnant with a girl. The paramount reason is because it means the women and/or their husbands deem males superior to females which is ludicrous.

The Indian government plans to set up a series of orphanages to raise unwanted baby girls in a bid to halt the widespread practice of aborting female fetuses, according to a senior government official.

Dubbed the "cradle scheme," the plan is an attempt to slow the practice that international groups say has killed more than 10 million female fetuses in the last two decades, leading to an alarming imbalance in the ratio between males and females in India, Renuka Chowdhury, the minister of state for women and child development, told the Press Trust of India news agency in an interview published Sunday.

"What we are saying to the people is have your children, don't kill them. And if you don't want a girl child, leave her to us," Chowdhury told the agency, adding that the government planned to set up a center in each regional district.

"We will bring up the children. But don't kill them because there really is a crisis situation," she said.

On Sunday, police arrested a gynecologist and janitor at a hospital near the central Indian city of Bhopal after the discovery of nearly 400 bones from fetuses and newborns in a pit behind the hospital. It is believed they are the remains of unwanted baby girls.

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