Beth and Marc are proud parents to Rebecca, who they met in dire circumstances.
Like any other regular day, firefighter Marc Hadden was privy to saving lives as part of his job in the fire department in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, but something happened on November 14, 2011, that changed his life forever. Whilst on duty, he found himself delivering a baby - something he had never done before, after a woman called 911 complaining of abdominal pain.
"She struggled from the minute she was put in my hands," Marc, 48, a firefighter, EMT, and a police officer in Surfside Beach, California, told PEOPLE, who just seconds after her birth, had put the 6-lb. 2-oz. baby on emergency oxygen. "It was amazing to hear her cry," he added.
At the time, not in his wildest imaginations had Marc thought that only 48 hours later would he bring the infant home, as her father.
Marc’s wife Beth, who is an instructional coach at a local elementary school and a part-time health and fitness coach, told what really conspired that fateful day at the time when Marc had received the call.
"We had just sat down to dinner and got the call for a woman with abdominal pains. This call was not actually supposed to be one for our station. It was rerouted to us through two other ambulances. We responded to a woman with abdominal pain and the woman said she was not pregnant."
"Marc, having two biological children, knew the symptoms and said he thought the woman was in labor. They loaded her into the ambulance and right about then, the baby girl was born. Marc helped her take her first breaths on the way to the hospital," she told Babble.
Marc and his wife, Beth, 39, who are parents to two young boys (Will, 15 and Parker, 13) were desirous of a third child but couldn't go ahead with the plans because of pregnancy complications which forced them to go ahead with adoption.Barely hours later at the hospital, when the biological mother of the infant made it clear she couldn’t care for her daughter, Marc decided to take the young girl back home as his own daughter. When Beth heard that the birth mother was a single mom already struggling to raise a teenage son, she felt compelled to go visit her the next day at the hospital. "My heart just went out to this woman. I brought her a little prayer book and asked I could get anything for her," Beth added. Beth further recalled how she got a phone call from Marc that day telling her, "I delivered a baby." And the first thought Beth has in mind was keeping the young child as her own daughter. "Can we keep her?" Beth asked jokingly. Marc responded, "I think she might be going up for adoption." "Suddenly the opportunity was there for me to say that Marc and I had been praying about adoption for years," Beth stated. "And she looked over at me and said, ‘I want you to adopt my baby.’ She had the nurse bring her in and I was able to hold Gracie (Marc and Beth named the young girl Rebecca Grace) for the first time. I called Marc and said, ‘I think we just had a baby,'" Beth revealed. By the end of that day, the couple had signed temporary-custody papers, and only 48 hours after her birth, they brought her home as a Hadden family member. “She is what we prayed for,” says Beth. “It felt like winning the lottery.”
