Rainbow Baby Portraits of 19-day-old Taron

When a Bicester-based couple wanted to start a family, it seemed like everything was against them. Would they ever get to hold their baby?

Charlie and Michael gave permission to share their story. Trigger warning: pregnancy loss.

Charlie had been told she’d never be able to have children naturally. So it came as a surprise when she was asked to take a pregnancy test while in hospital for suspected kidney stones. It was an even bigger surprise when the test came back positive.

It was bad news, though: the foetus was growing in one of Charlie’s Fallopian tubes, rather than in her womb. It was an ectopic pregnancy, which can be life threatening.

She was taken to the maternity ward the next morning for scans, and had to endure the sounds of other parents anticipating or welcoming their new arrivals, while knowing that the life inside her wasn’t going to make it.

“Keep trying,” the doctors urged her afterwards, “If you can get pregnant naturally once, then you can do it again.”

Five years passed.

Charlie and her partner Michael turned to IVF. During the medical examination, it turned out that Charlie’s other Fallopian tube was scarred and blocked, so a natural pregnancy had always been out of the question.

Charlie started taking hormone injections. At first, they were once a day, then twice. Her eggs were harvested, and twelve were successfully fertilised. The very best blastocyst (pre-embryo) was selected for implantation:

“At this point,” Charlie says, “You’re considered PUPO: pregnant until proven otherwise. I was optimistic but realistic. I thought, if it works, great. If it doesn’t, well we did everything the hospital told us to. We tried.”

Michael was less confident: “I was sure it wasn’t going to work. Absolutely sure,” he said.

11 days later Charlie carried out a pregnancy test. It was positive but despite the great news Michael didn’t allow himself to feel any hope or excitement.

“I now worried that the baby would be in the wrong place, and we’d lose him or her anyway.”

Happily, the scans showed the embryo was where it should be, but Michael still couldn’t relax.

“I thought even in the unlikely event that the baby did make it, there would be some sort of mix up with the blastocysts. It would turn out to be someone else’s baby, and we’d have to give it back. I truly believed there was no way we were going to get to have a baby.”

The couple tentatively started choosing baby names.

“We wrote down names we liked,” said Charlie, “Then swapped out lists and ticked the ones we agreed on. Taron was one of our favourites. We’ve got Welsh roots, and Taron is Welsh for ‘King of the Land’.”

Weeks passed, then months. Everything was going smoothly, until at 35 weeks Charlie’s hands suddenly turned itchy. Non-stop, scratch-off-your-skin itchy.

She posted about it on Facebook and a friend flagged up that it could be serious. Charlie went to hospital and was diagnosed with obstetric cholestasis. This condition increases the risk of having a stillborn child, so Charlie was scheduled to be induced early.

Things started moving towards labour while Michael was on his last shift at work before starting paternity leave.

“I was so excited when Charlie told me that things were happening,” he said, “I was hugging my colleagues and high-fiving customers. With half an hour to go I was literally dancing on the shop floor, and some of my team members were crying. That day was my quickest commute home – I practically sprinted all the way home.”

Charlie’s contractions increased in frequency and intensity and she was admitted to the maternity ward – the same one where five years ago she’d sat trying to hold herself together as the only mum-not-to-be in the room.

Eventually the labour progressed to the point where an emergency caesarian section was required. Suddenly everything was moving quickly and Michael was told to put covers over his clothes so he could enter the delivery room. Even at that point, Michael was preparing for the worst. It seemed too much to hope for that a little life could overcome so many hurdles.

Family features

“When I saw our baby for the first time, I noticed he had his mum’s nose. That’s when I knew everything had gone right, despite the odds. I cried and cried and the relief hit me. My glasses flooded with tears and I had to take them off. Charlie is the only person I have ever been properly emotionally attached to, and here she was, going through all this, and then our baby was safely delivered and we’d made it. It hit home that there was nothing to worry about anymore. We had our baby.”

Michael cut the cord, and the medical staff asked if he wanted to hold the baby.

“I was shaking so bad from all the emotion, and I have actually never held a baby before so I was worried about dropping him. They told me to sit down and helped me to calm down. They put him in my arms and I just stared at him. They asked if I wanted to put the little hat on him to keep his head warm and I remember how weird but wonderful that felt – I have never put a hat on someone else before.”

The couple were given the all-clear to head home on what had been the baby’s due date.

“It was the end of a long journey,” Charlie said, “From the ectopic pregnancy to the IVF and through the labour. Finally we had him home and safe. It’s already as though he’s been with us the whole time – I can’t imagine a life without him.”

“Finally I could sleep again,” Michael added, “I couldn’t shut down for so long because I was so worried, and now we are all safe I can relax once more.”

Charlie requested that some of the pictures use a rainbow theme for her newborn photography session with me, because “after every storm there’s a rainbow of hope. I lost my first baby so Taron is my little rainbow baby. Now our family is complete.”

These are some of my favourites from our shoot:

Afterwards, Charlie said:

“I can’t recommend Sarah highly enough. She understood what we wanted to achieve with our bump and baby shoot. We both loved how everything Sarah did was done to make us feel relaxed, giving us the most natural photos instead of the forced photos which we wanted to avoid. She was happy to organise the [maternity photoshoot] in an outside area of our choosing and the images we decided on were fantastic. We couldn’t have imagined they would ever be that good. When it came to the baby shoot, Sarah again made us feel so relaxed which in turn helped my little one stay chilled out for the session. Sarah is fantastic, and we can’t wait to have family photos done in the future.”

Charlie and Michael gave their permission to share their story. They have been supported by the Ectopic Pregnancy Trust. For more information or to donate, head to www.ectopic.org.uk.

If you are interested in newborn photography, please get in contact:

Sarah Plater LMPA is a qualified, certified professional newborn photographer based in Bicester, Oxfordshire