Baby Austin weighed less than five pounds when his mother brought him to an Indiana hospital with no paperwork or medical history.
The mom only had one thing in mind: to drop off her son under Indiana’s Safe Haven Law, in hopes that he would have a better life.
Doctors determined that the tiny baby must have been born six weeks early. As luck would have it, the drop-off was fate in the making.
Brian and Eden Gildea had been trying to expand their family for five years. However, they couldn’t conceive naturally. When they turned to adoption, it was even more heartbreaking. The couple had two adoptions fall through. It was devastating.
“You go through the process of the procedures and everything, and you get your hopes up thinking it’s going to happen this time, and it doesn’t,” Eden told RTV6.
Then Eden got a bombshell phone call. There was a baby boy left anonymously at Fort Wayne Hospital. The couple went to the hospital, and as soon as they held him, they just knew.
“It’s amazing how your maternal instincts just kick in from the very beginning,” Eden said. “I was very protective of him. I wanted to take care of him and make him ours.”
The family is sharing their story because we often hear news stories about babies left in Safe Haven drop-offs, but rarely hear about what happens afterward. Brian and Eden want parents to know that Safe Haven babies do end up in safe homes. The baby, whom they named Austin, is now 11 years old and forever grateful to his parents.
“When you are adopted, they love you more than sometimes your birth parents, because they truly want to take care of you,” Austin said.
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