Baby found alive in a morgue drawer—12 hours after being pronounced dead

A mother found her newborn daughter alive 12 hours after the baby was pronounced stillborn—in a refrigerated drawer of a hospital morgue in Argentina.

In the Perrando Hospital of Resistencia, in the northern Argentine province of Chaco, Analia Bouter gave birth to her fifth child after a difficult and short 26-week pregnancy. According to the doctors, however, the baby girl was born without vital signs and later taken to the hospital’s morgue.

Before leaving the hospital, Bouter and her husband asked hospital staff to see their baby’s body, which had been kept for 12 hours in the refrigerated drawer of the hospital’s morgue. According to the Argentine paper Clarin, when Bouter touched the baby’s hand in the frigid metallic drawer, her daughter sighed and moved.

Five doctors in the hospital were suspended preemptively as the provincial health ministry investigates the case.