Woman Gives Birth In Truck On US Highway 89
Oct 9, 2020, 10:53 PM | Updated: Oct 10, 2020, 8:25 pm
NORTH SALT LAKE, Utah – A woman gave birth in a truck early Friday morning along U.S. Highway 89 with only her husband present to help deliver the baby.
Mariah Simmonds said her plan was to have her baby naturally at a birth center, but the contractions began to increase unexpectedly late Thursday evening.
“I called the midwife and said, ‘What should we do? Should we come in?’ and she said, ‘Go take a bath and see if they calm down and if your contractions calm down, we’ll meet up a little later.’”
Simmonds said the contractions slowed to 12 minutes apart before she went to bed around midnight.
It wasn’t how they planned it, but the birth of young Macy is a story they’ll never forget. Check it out @KSL5TV at 10p #KSLTV #Utah pic.twitter.com/Jzs0ZVOmrt
— Andrew Adams (@AndrewAdamsKSL) October 10, 2020
Around 1 a.m. Friday, Simmonds woke up and the contractions had intensified once again. Her husband, Kirk Simmonds, encouraged her to get going.
“I had five contractions about two minutes apart from here to the truck,” Simmonds said Friday afternoon from her living room in North Salt Lake. “We were just barely making it out there and he’s like, ‘We’ve got to go, we’ve got to go, we’re not going to make it.’”
The couple jumped in their Ford F-150 and started making the trek north toward the birth center.
“We took I-15 up to Highway 89 and my water broke and I was like, ‘She’s coming, we can’t stop her!’” Simmonds said. “He’s like, ‘Should I pull over?’ And I was like, ‘No, drive faster!’”
Her husband couldn’t drive fast enough, and the couple pulled off U.S. 89 near South Weber Drive.
“The next contraction came and she started to come out and so he pulled over and ran across the road to my side and finished delivering her and he just caught her — right there on the side of the road!” Simmonds said.
Her husband said he was terrified.
“(I) opened up the door and she was right there,” Kirk Simmonds said. “Luckily I was able to catch her and everything worked out good.”
The mother of four said little Macy was doing well, not even 24 hours into life.
“She’s just been perfect,” Mariah Simmonds said. “She likes to be snuggled and bundled!”
Though it wasn’t the usual route to deliver a baby, the couple acknowledged this birth in a truck along the side of the road wasn’t a bad detour in the end.
“I know there were angels watching out for us because she came exactly how she needed to,” Simmonds said. “She was ready to come and we weren’t doing anything to stop her.”
