Woman Delivers Her Own Baby On The Freeway While Driving To Hospital After Water Broke

When Box Elder mother-to-be Mariah Ostler was travelling at 75 mph on the I-15 on Saturday, desperately trying to make it to the hospital in time to have her baby, she knew it was going to get interesting when her water broke.

Ostler spoke on Sunday from her hospital room at Brigham City Hospital. She spoke to the press while holding her newborn son, whom she delivered basically herself.

I knew the baby was coming and it doesn’t help to panic. So, I just stayed calm and said, ‘Well, if I deliver it on my own then I deliver it on my own. If somebody gets here, somebody gets here. The baby is here. There’s not much more I can do about it.

Thankfully for Ostler, 32, help was already on its way in the form of Utah Highway Patrol trooper Josh Carr and Willard Police Chief Jean Loveland. who arrived just as the woman was giving birth to her 9.9 pound baby boy.

Being that she was already a few days overdue, Ostler decided to drive over to her mom’s house as she thought she might be going into labor. Having left her six-year-old child with her mother, Ostler was sure she felt some contractions and decided to head toward the hospital,

As reported by the AP, “I was hoping that I would make it. But then my water broke and I called dispatch because once my water breaks … there’s the baby. There’s no time once that happens,” she said.

Adding, “I was in the fast lane. I was trying to get over to the slow lane so I could pull over to the side, but cars wouldn’t let me over. It doesn’t matter if you have your blinker on or not,” she joked.

Brittney Chugg, the emergency dispatcher who took Ostler’s panicky call told reporters,

I thought it was somebody calling in like a traffic problem or a reckless driver or something like that. Obviously the first issue was to get her off the road so she wouldn’t deliver a baby while driving. We knew. We just knew it was going to happen. There was going to be a baby on the side of the freeway right then.

For trooper Carr, who was an EMT for 14 years, the roadside birth was a first for him, “They tell you to be prepared to take a life and give life. Thank goodness this was one of the two I had the opportunity to do. To train for it, there is no training. They tell you how to do it. But this is the only way you’re going to learn is to actually do it,” he said.